News
Tango in the Matworld Paper Now In Press
November 03, 2022
Just off the coast of Middle Island near Alpena, Michigan, is a submerged sinkhole filled with sulfur-rich and oxygen-poor water on the bottom of Lake Huron. Within this sinkhole thrives microbial mats that we observed to change color depending on the time of day using a time-series camera. We observed the photosynthetic purple cyanobacteria rise to the surface of the mat during the day and white chemosynthetic bacteria rise to the surface during the night. The study, now published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research, details the vivid color changes and tries to understand why such changes occur.