Lava tubes on Earth represent some of the most enticing Martian analogue environments when investigating the possibility of past or present life on Mars. Lava tubes provide stable, sheltered environments, isolated and protected from the radiation on the surface. The microbial mats in these caves further regulate the environment for life, allowing various microbial communities with different metabolisms to coexist. This adaptation is so successful, one could imagine such a microbe-mineral continuum might occur on other planets. The data from this package is from investigated lava caves in Iceland. The project aims to correlate biological and mineralogical data to describe the interactions between the microbes and their geological substrates, to identify microbe-specific speleothems as biosignatures, and to develop a sampling technique in these fragile environments. This is achieved with a combination of X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), DNA sequencing, scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM/EDS), and confocal Raman microscopy.
The data is provided in 6 subfolders for 6 experiments/samples. Detailed information about the files in these subfolders is given in the explanatory file Kopacz_et_al_2022_Data_description. Contact person is Nina Kopacz - Researcher - k.a.kopacz@uu.nl
