Movement of microbes through landscapes presents a question of scaling that links geochemistry, hydrology, microbiology, and ecosystem function, with implications for understanding the earliest establishment of life on earth and its distribution and resilience in our changing world today. How do microbes flow through soils? What is their residence time in subsurface pools? And what are the implications for such processes in both evolutionary and ecological timescales? As part of a convergent research team focusing on the science of terraformation -- how life shapes the substrates and dynamics of environments in a manner that supports succession and the development of ecological complexity -- we leveraged the instrumentation and history of microbial ecology at the Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO - Biosphere2, University of Arizona) to characterize microbial succession in the transition from crushed basalt to soil-like microbial communities, and then used isotopically labeled rainfall pulses to track microbial movements and residence times in subsurface substrates and waters. Previous LEO research revealed depth-dependent stratification of microbial community composition in the basalt profile, which led us to hypothesize that microbial composition in discharge waters would likewise vary as the water table fluctuated in response to precipitation intensity. Indeed, we detected variation in cell concentrations as a function of discharge, as well as discharge-dependent variation in microbial composition. Moreover, we observed dynamics of microbes on the basaltic surface that differed from those below recently established cyanobacterial crusts and moss communities, with microbial persistence and movement suggesting a high degree of interconnectedness among regions connected by surface- vs. subsurface water flow. We explore the implications of our emerging model system for terraformation in early and emergent landscapes, highlighting through a lens of convergent science a series of hypotheses regarding the timelines and spatial elements of microbial dispersal, residence, and impact in earth system processes.