concept

Primary succession

The colonisation of a wholly new or newly exposed surface with no soil, no microbial community and no surviving propagules: cooled lava, deep volcanic tephra, a retreating glacier's foreland, a freshly emerged volcanic island like Surtsey. The rate-limiting step is making soil — life must build the ground itself, almost atom by atom, before a forest is even possible. Primary succession is therefore agonisingly slow: centuries to millennia. The Mangkwan Ashlands were reset to exactly this starting point when the eruption cooked away the old soil.