#microbialite

[life-on-our-planet]

At the bottom of Lake Untersee in Antarctica are giant stromatolites, an ancient form of life on our planet. They first appeared closer in time to the formation of Earth, three and a half billion years ago, than to the present day. Scientists hope that studying these organisms in such a hostile environment will help us understand and recognize life on icy worlds beyond our own. BBC Earth

[bowlerhatscience]

What Is Life?

I've republished my 2015 feature article for the now-defunct magazine Mosaic. Would we recognize life if we found it on other worlds? I went to western Canada to find out

If we met new life – on this planet or the next – would we know it when we saw it? [This piece originally ran in Mosaic Science on October 20, 2015, but the publisher decided to remove all of the magazine’s archives from the web. This is the complete text as published — including British spelling — using my photographs instead of the original illustrations.] “Why would NASA want to study a lake…

[togglesbloggle]

I was tagged by @wellmetmat in @perdvivly's ask meme that's going around- thanks for the interest! A few questions, they shall be answered. I won't tag anyone else for now, but anyone who sees this should absolutely respond if they're so inclined.

1. What virtue do you most often see in other people that you feel comparatively deficient in?

Easy one for me: diligence. Consistency, commitment, patient sustained focus on moderate challenges. Being there not on day 1 but on day 1000.

It's a skill I greatly admire in others, and I'm often drawn to those who can practice it successfully and consistently. The virtue of diligence has a way of making the world around oneself a dramatically better place, so being attracted to such people really works out well for me in the long run. Good parenting is perhaps one of the ur-examples here; the stakes of consistency get about as high as they reasonably can, and the rewards are just as clear. I've heard parents say that it's a time of very long days and very short years, and I often strive to give my days and my years the same quality- with not as much success as I'd like.

2. Show us an object in your daily life that you have an emotional attachment to - tell us a little bit about it if you want! (a favourite mug perhaps? socks with a cute pattern? dealers choice)

I actually live more-or-less surrounded by little curios that meet this description, so I had a lot to choose from. It's a lifestyle, or at least a method of interior decorating, that makes me really happy. I grabbed these three more or less at random. From left to right:

Every geologist has a collection of boring-looking rocks with cool science attached; this is the star of my collection. It's a microbialite, meaning roughly that it's a 'fossil' of an ancient microbial mat. This one is from the Buck Reef Chert in South Africa, basically a piece of flint. It's 3.42 billion years old, from the Paleoarchean. It's nearly seven times older than multicellular life, and even predates oxygenic photosynthesis (which is the pattern where plants or green algae uptake CO2 and release oxygen); the organisms that created this fossil breathed iron instead. So it's the sort of organism that was common in the shallower waters of Earth's oceans back in the most primordial ecosystems we have a record of. A relic from an alien world, older than a full third of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. I find it very beautiful to be biologically related to it, and to be part of the same uninterrupted organic chemical reaction.

In the middle is my orchestrator badge for a university class which conducts an elaborate simulation of the papal election of 1492 and its aftermath, run by a professor in the history department- this is last year's. You may recognize 1492 in the Italian peninsula as 'interesting times'. It's taken for class credit, but the heart of it is a LARP that plays out over the course of about two and a half weeks, with full costuming and set-dressing. Every student is assigned a particular period character; most are voting cardinals, some are monarchs ruling over France or Spain and trying to get a favorable pope for themselves, a few are invented minor roles like vote counters that wouldn't have been recorded by history (so that clever cardinals can bribe them, among other things; we have rules for how much the vote-takers can cheat). After suitable prep, we let them loose, and watch the poor bastards chase incentive gradients far enough to burn Europe to the ground. I myself pretend to be a mere orchestrator for the first three days of the simulation, and act mostly as a custodian for the monarchs, but then I dramatically reveal myself to actually be Sultan Bayezid II, of the Ottoman Empire, and then proceed to menace Europe with my impossible wealth, vast armies, and advanced technologies. It is, without fail, a delight.

The right is a watch given to me as a birthday gift some years ago by my dear sister, one of the marvelous transparent ones where you can see finely made gears and springs all working. It's effective for being taken seriously in Europe; combined with brown leather shoes and a thoughtful choice of shirt, it's enough to elevate you above the 'slobby American tourist' first impressions. The watch's finest hour was when I wore it to the front row of the Penn and Teller production of Shakespeare's Tempest. The show was full of stage magic to supplement the play itself, because of course it was, and this watch was irresistible to them during the audience-participation bits. Ariel the wind spirit made a great show of stealing it off my wrist, and of disappearing it and so on multiple times.

3. If you could choose, what level of fame would you want? How many people would you want to recognise you?

There's a level of demifame that I think is just right: enough respect within a widely-spread subculture to earn a comfortable income from fans, and relative anonymity outside it. Jo Walton is at about that sweet spot, for a concrete example. In practice, I think this translates to a few tens of thousands of people around the world that would recognize you, but the key is that they're not randomly selected: they're the people that you share that subculture with, so there's a baseline of mutual regard and shared values even when you're greeted out of nowhere by a stranger in a strange city.

4. Where do you feel language is least adequate to capture, communicate, or express your experience?

What a mean question to ask by text! Ha.

There's a set of experiences you can reach, which I happened to find both through scientific literacy and mindfulness meditation, involving the conditionality and contingencies of personal identity. You may have felt it a little bit when I was talking about my favorite rock, just now; you might not have. I have a powerful and sustained sense of myself as an expression of natural processes, or perhaps of the role of consciousness in illuminating the full depth of that process. It's quite comforting, I suppose, though even that's not a particularly apt description really. I think I called it being 'deep okay' a while back, though I don't recall where; I don’t think I came up with that label myself though. It was here!

5. If you had to come up with a question with the following criteria:

a) it should disuade knee-jerk reaction answers (i.e. it shouldn't be something people are likely to have spent a lot of time considering before)

b) it shouldn't be too specialised (the audience should be general, don't ask about people's top 3 byzantine spice merchants opperating between 754AD-816AD)

c) it shouldn't be needlessly emotionally charged or divisive

d) it should be a question you expect people to have lots of varied opinions about

What would your question be?

What are the kinds of magic you most wish for, or the laws of reality that you most wish could be overcome? What would this allow you to become?

---

Actually I lied I'm tagging @ritterum @femmenietzsche @eka-mark if they haven't been already.

[revretch]

Fallout bothers me because if animals were struggling so much and plants practically entirely dead, that place should have been booming with bacteria. Algae everywhere. Without animals to graze on them, huge microbialites. I'm just saying

[doppelgangerleaverite]

I wanna talk about Green Lake, not because i find it particularly scary personally but it is Deep and Weird and i feel like it fits. it also has a sister lake Round Lake which has generally the same characteristics. Green Lake is not particularly large (diameter somewhere in the ballpark of 850 feet) but it is almost TWO HUNDRED feet deep. Both lakes were formed by glacial plunge pools (big waterfall coming off the edge of a glacier). and, because of how deep they are, both lakes are meromictic! that means their deepest waters (after a depth of like 55 feet), never mix with the surface waters. most lakes turn over and mix fully 1-3+ times a year. being meromictic creates some extremely weird chemical conditions in the lakes. the bottom layer is devoid of oxygen, and very rich in sulfur. between the two layers, there are pink microbes that live in a colony a few inches deep and spread across the whole lake. above the chemocline (that 55 ft depth where the chemistry changes), there are freshwater sponges AND organisms called microbialites which live similarly to coral by depositing calcium carbonate. these are the reefs you see in the above picture.

Here it is folks:

My definitive ranking of my least favorite bodies of water! These are ranked from least to most scary (1/10 is okay, 10/10 gives me nightmares). I’m sorry this post is long, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this.

The Great Blue Hole, Belize

I’ve been here! I have snorkeled over this thing! It is terrifying! The water around the hole is so shallow you can’t even swim over the coral without bumping it, and then there’s a little slope down, and then it just fucking drops off into the abyss! When you’re over the hole the water temperature drops like 10 degrees and it’s midnight blue even when you’re right by the surface. Anyway. The Great Blue Hole is a massive underwater cave, and its roughly 410 feet deep. Overall, it’s a relatively safe area to swim. It’s a popular tourist attraction and recreational divers can even go down and explore some of the caves. People do die at the Blue Hole, but it is generally from a lack of diving experience rather than anything sinister going on down in the depths. My rating for this one is 1/10 because I’ve been here and although it’s kinda freaky it’s really not that bad.

Lake Baikal, Russia

When I want to give myself a scare I look at the depth diagram of this lake. It’s so deep because it’s not a regular lake, it’s a Rift Valley, A massive crack in the earth’s crust where the continental plates are pulling apart. It’s over 5,000 feet deep and contains one-fifth of all freshwater on Earth. Luckily, its not any more deadly than a normal lake. It just happens to be very, very, freakishly deep. My rating for this lake is a 2/10 because I really hate looking at the depth charts but just looking at the lake itself isn’t that scary.

Jacob’s Well, Texas

This “well” is actually the opening to an underwater cave system. It’s roughly 120 feet deep, surrounded by very shallow water. This area is safe to swim in, but diving into the well can be deadly. The cave system below has false exits and narrow passages, resulting in multiple divers getting trapped and dying. My rating is a 3/10, because although I hate seeing that drop into the abyss it’s a pretty safe place to swim as long as you don’t go down into the cave (which I sure as shit won’t).

The Devil’s Kettle, Minnesota

This is an area in the Brule River where half the river just disappears. It literally falls into a hole and is never seen again. Scientists have dropped in dye, ping pong balls, and other things to try and figure out where it goes, and the things they drop in never resurface. Rating is 4/10 because Sometimes I worry I’m going to fall into it.

Flathead Lake, Montana

Everyone has probably seen this picture accompanied by a description about how this lake is actually hundreds of feet deep but just looks shallow because the water is so clear. If that were the case, this would definitely rank higher, but that claim is mostly bull. Look at the shadow of the raft. If it were hundreds of feet deep, the shadow would look like a tiny speck. Flathead lake does get very deep, but the spot the picture was taken in is fairly shallow. You can’t see the bottom in the deep parts. However, having freakishly clear water means you can see exactly where the sandy bottom drops off into blackness, so this still ranks a 5/10.

The Lower Congo River, multiple countries

Most of the Congo is a pretty normal, if large, River. In the lower section of it, however, lurks a disturbing surprise: massive underwater canyons that plunge down to 720 feet. The fish that live down there resemble cave fish, having no color, no eyes, and special sensory organs to find their way in the dark. These canyons are so sheer that they create massive rapids, wild currents and vortexes that can very easily kill you if you fall in. A solid 6/10, would not go there.

Little Crater Lake, Oregon

On first glance this lake doesn’t look too scary. It ranks this high because I really don’t like the sheer drop off and how clear it is (because it shows you exactly how deep it goes). This lake is about 100 feet across and 45 feet deep, and I strongly feel that this is too deep for such a small lake. Also, the water is freezing, and if you fall into the lake your muscles will seize up and you’ll sink and drown. I don’t like that either. 7/10.

Grand Turk 7,000 ft drop off

No. 8/10. I hate it.

Gulf of Corryvreckan, Scotland

Due to a quirk in the sea floor, there is a permanent whirlpool here. This isn’t one of those things that looks scary but actually won’t hurt you, either. It absolutely will suck you down if you get too close. Scientists threw a mannequin with a depth gauge into it and when it was recovered the gauge showed it went down to over 600 feet. If you fall into this whirlpool you will die. 9/10 because this seems like something that should only be in movies.

The Bolton Strid, England

This looks like an adorable little creek in the English countryside but it’s not. Its really not. Statistically speaking, this is the most deadly body of water in the world. It has a 100% mortality rate. There is no recorded case of anyone falling into this river and coming out alive. This is because, a little ways upstream, this isn’t a cute little creek. It’s the River Wharfe, a river approximately 30 feet wide. This river is forced through a tiny crack in the earth, essentially turning it on its side. Now, instead of being 30 feet wide and 6 feet deep, it’s 6 feet wide and 30 feet deep (estimated, because no one actually knows how deep the Strid is). The currents are deadly fast. The banks are extremely undercut and the river has created caves, tunnels and holes for things (like bodies) to get trapped in. The innocent appearance of the Strid makes this place a death trap, because people assume it’s only knee-deep and step in to never be seen again. I hate this river. I have nightmares about it. I will never go to England just because I don’t want to be in the same country as this people-swallowing stream. 10/10, I live in constant fear of this place.

Honorable mention: The Quarry, Pennsylvania

I don’t know if that’s it’s actual name. This lake gets an honorable mention not because it’s particularly deep or dangerous, but it’s where I almost drowned during a scuba diving accident.

[easydoesit-rn]

Studyblr but this time for real:

I have been trying to make an study blog for long and haven't really work on it. So, hi again, here's somethings about me.

Name: Chris

Age: 22

Pronouns: He/They

Career: Space Sciences - Probably going for astrobiology, instrumentation, or planetary geology.

Others: Mexican, INTP, AuDHD, generalized anxiety, Agender, Aroace.

Courses I'm failing taking this semester:

* Analog electronics

* Space Weather

* Planetology/Planetary Sciences

* Differential equations

* Advanced programming

Things I like:

• Cartoons:

- Wander Over Yonder

- Wordgirl

- OK K.O! Let's be Heroes!

- Kid Cosmic

- She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

- Bee and Puppycat

- Over the Garden Wall

- Hilda

- Carmen Sandiego

- Other: Gravity Falls, Steven Universe, Infinity Train, Green Eggs and Ham, Final Space, The Owl House, Avatar (ATLA & TLOK), The Dragon Prince

- Anime: Aggretsuko, Little Witch Academia, Brand New Animal.

•Living beings:

I am interested in life in general but some things that interest me more:

- Chevrotains.

- Spiders.

- Isopods.

- Dogs.

- Jellyfish.

- Cacti & succulents.

- Microbialites, extremophiles, evolution, origins of life.

• Activities:

-Crochet

-Reading

-Writing

-Field Trips

-Watching cartoons

-Learning languages

-Just wandering around and finding nice bugs and rocks and plants.

-Learning new things.

-Medieval combat.

-Drawing.

-Cross stitch.

I really hope I can update this blog more often, I have some things planned for it and I hope I can achieve them.

[luxebeat]

Exploring Mars from The Depths of a Canadian Lake

Exploring Mars from The Depths of a Canadian Lake

  In late October 2020 one of my brothers from another mother, Michel Joseph, messaged me to ask if Kathryn and I wanted to go scuba diving in Pavilion Lake. Since Kathryn had some prior work commitments she could not reschedule, Michel and I made a lightening trip up to Pavilion. Michel had dived this lake numerous times before and for this visit we seized upon a window of opportunity between a…

[sciencetoastudent]

Modern microbialite from the Great Salt Lake (above), and a fossil microbialite from Uinta County (below) @nhmu! #nhmu #microbialite #microbe #bacteria #science #usofscience #saltlakecity #utah #microbiology #naturalhistorymuseumofutah #stromatolite (at Natural History Museum of Utah)

[bogleech]

@revretch was reading a lot about stromatolites and microbialites yesterday and we both always knew of them but I didn't know the very largest freshwater ones are unique to the naturally carbonated lake van.

They're bacteria that live in colonies of their own mineral deposits, almost like a much cruder version of corals building up their calcium skeletons. Some also live in caves, so apparently there are just stalagmites out there that are also alive 🙂

If you think you know how peculiar life on earth can be you should know about the living rocks in soda lakes

[fossilera]

This is a stunning, 17.5 x 14", polished stromatolite (Greysonia) section from the Miraflores Formation from Bolivia. One face has been cut and polished while the other side shows the natural, exterior to the stromatolite.

Stromatolites are the layered trace fossils of microbial life, primarily cyanobacteria. Some of them date back an astounding 3.4 billion years, making them the oldest record of life on planet Earth. Stromatolites and Microbialites were typically formed in shallow water by the growth of layer upon layer of cyanobacteria, a single-celled, photosynthesizing microbe. These layers often form very beautiful, and colorful banded structures in the rock.

For sale at: https://www.fossilera.com/fossils-for-sale/stromatolite-fossils

[retentionalfinitude2]

“A thrombolite looks like a spongy rounded stone or rock-like column that lives in shallow seas or lake waters. Located at only a small number of places around the world, thrombolites are made up of a complex community of microorganisms, including cyanobacteria, cemented with inert materials in the form of collected mineral sediment or other materials and detritus....Because of the precipitation of calcium carbonate as a biosediment, microbialites embody the idea of a mineral/vegetable thing that crosses the boundary between the living and the nonliving worlds.” --Perdita Phillips, Fossil

Photograph: Perdita Phillips, Thrombolites at Lake Clifton

[americangeophysicalunion]

Hidden Life of Giant Microbialite Reefs in Laguna Bacalar, Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico

Dear Eos,

Laguna Bacalar in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico – called “lake of seven colors” by the Maya for its varying shades of turquoise and blue – is home to one of the largest freshwater microbialite reefs (“living rocks”) in the world. Here, a near contiguous microbialite reef runs along its southern shoreline lined by cenotes (sinkholes) for over 15 km. These modern-day massive microbialite reef structures are formed – like those of the fossil stromatolites – by a mms-thin living layer of subsurface cyanobacteria growing in the carbonate-rich karstic waters of the lagoon. Therein µm-sized filamentous cyanobacteria precipitate calcium carbonate during photosynthesis, and keep rising as the reef builds up around them to stay within the sunlit zone. Life in the mircobialite ecosystem appears to hide just mms beneath the limestone surface – in a thin “Goldilocks Zone” – neither on the very surface where filaments might suffer UV-photodamage nor too far below the surface where they may receive too little sunlight and water-borne nutrients for photosynthesis and growth. Today, the unique ecology and indigenous culture of Laguna Bacalar (Mexico’s 2nd largest lake) are both threatened, and deserve protection as a biosphere reserve (www.lagunabacalar.org/).

So much of life on Earth occurs hidden from our senses below the surface, and remain understudied in terms of their evolutionary, physiologic, biogeochemical and biodiversity potential. Perhaps we should be probing, imaging, and studying all forms of extant subsurface life for a more fuller understanding of Earth’s closely inter-connected biosphere.

Bopi Biddanda, Annis Water Resources Institute, Grand Valley State University, Muskegon, Michigan (www.gvsu.edu/wri/), and Scott Kendall, Life Science Department, Muskegon Community College, Muskegon, Michigan (www.muskegoncc.edu/life-sciences/)

[gubgam]

Me: put simply, these are sedimentary ‘jawbreakers’ made by a microbial mat

prof editing my draft: no, less simply

Me: put simplyer, ~+*pet rock*~+

[frontal-cortex]

"Cathodoluminescence enlightening the origin of carbonates" by Clément Pollier, University of Geneva by SNSF Scientific Image Competition Via Flickr: Entry in category 1. Object of study; Copyright CC-BY-NC-ND: Clément Pollier Picture of a thin-section of microbialite under cathodoluminescence microscopy. The intensity of luminescence is proportional to the amount of trace elements present in the calcite, which is useful for studying the history of rock formation. These carbonates, precipitated by cyanobacteria, were collected at the Laguna de Los Cisnes (Tierra del Fuego, Chile) as part of my master thesis in geology. This image reveals concentric structures representing different phases of calcite cementation that have developed around a cyanobacterium filament that has now disappeared (leaving the cavity in the center).

[newscountryindia]

A Lake In Turkey May Hold Clues To Ancient Life On Mars

A Lake In Turkey May Hold Clues To Ancient Life On Mars

A general view of an exposed island of old microbialites at Salda Lake in Burdur province, Turkey. Lake Salda, Turkey: As NASA’s rover Perseverance explores the surface of Mars, scientists hunting for signs of ancient life on the distant planet are using data gathered on a mission much closer to home at a lake in southwest Turkey. NASA says the minerals and rock deposits at Salda are the nearest…

[guardiannews24]

Turkish lake may hold clues to ancient life on planet By Reuters

Turkish lake may hold clues to ancient life on planet By Reuters

6/6 © Reuters. General view of exposed island of old microbialites at Turkey’s lake Salda in Burdur province 2/6 By Yesim Dikmen LAKE SALDA, Turkey (Reuters) – As NASA’s rover Perseverance explores the surface of Mars, scientists hunting for signs of ancient life on the distant planet are using data gathered on a mission much closer to home at a lake in southwest Turkey. NASA says the minerals…