KT Cooper is a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol. A carbonate geochemist by training, she has just returned from a three-month secondment to Houston, Texas, USA working with Exxon Mobil.
When you start looking at things at a microscopic level, everything starts to look a little alien. Minerals assemblages can look like the landscapes of far off planets and microbes can look like their inhabitants. One such type of alien looking microscopic life form are diatoms.
Diatom images showing the variability in their beautiful morphology. Photo credit: Kate Hendry
Diatoms are type of algae and their colonies generate the strangest of shapes; think of them as nature’s 3D spirographs. Their cell walls are composed of silica and they can be found in many aquatic environments, from the oceans to freshwaters. Diatoms can be used to inform scientists about the environment in which they grew and how this may have been altered due to climate change. But for me, it’s just interesting to see the huge variability in their morphology.
Diatom found on a sample of limestone from a blue hole in the Bahamas. Photo Credit: KT Cooper