Establishment of a Biological Monitoring Site on the Eyjafjallajoekull Fissure, Iceland

位于冰岛雷克雅未克以东的Eyjafjallajoekull裂缝于4月15日破裂，从1公里长的洞口喷出熔岩。这一事件为我们提供了一个难得的机会，可以建立一个长期的生态监测点，研究火山熔岩随时间的殖民，了解新形成的岩石中碳循环的发展和生物岩石风化的早期过程。在这笔紧急赠款中，我们寻求支持，以开始对熔岩进行生物监测，并建立一个关于岩浆流动的微生物监测观测站。这项工作对地球科学的两个领域具有直接的重要性：1)了解新鲜的火山岩是如何被殖民的，以及生物群在就位后不久在岩石风化中发挥了什么作用；2)了解了在火山岩上建立碳循环和活跃的微生物群落的事件顺序，火山岩是地球上分布最广、最常形成的新的岩石基质。我们计划对该地点的熔岩进行初步采样和分析，并建立一个气象站，以期对生物群落的流动进行长期监测。这项工作将对火山岩殖民产生新的科学见解，并对建立长期微生物观测站产生新的定义方案和技术见解，我们可以将其应用于其他地方。

The Eyjafjallajoekull fissure, east of Reykjavik, Iceland, ruptured on April 15, spreading lava from 1 km-long opening. This event offers us a remarkable opportunity to establish a long-term ecological monitoring site to study the colonization of volcanic lava flows over time, to understand the development of a carbon cycle in newly formed rocks and the early processes of biological rock weathering. In this urgency grant we seek support to begin biological monitoring of the lava and to establish a microbial monitoring observatory on the flows. This work has direct importance for two areas of earth sciences: 1) understanding how fresh volcanic rocks, which account for 30% of carbon dioxide drawdown from the atmosphere each year through weathering, become colonized and what role a biota plays in rock weathering soon after its emplacement, 2) understanding the sequence of events for the establishment of a carbon cycle and active microbial communities on volcanic rocks, the most widespread and commonly formed new rock substrate on the Earth. We plan to carry out preliminary sampling and analysis of lava from of the site and to establish a weather station with a view to long-term monitoring of the biotic community on the flows. This work will yield new scientific insights into volcanic rock colonization and new defined protocols and technical insights into establishing long-term microbial observatories which we could apply elsewhere.