Fig. 1: Characteristics of initial architectures of microbialites from Hamelin Pool.
From: Arsenic enrichment patterns are defined by microbialite morphology, fabric, and accretion mechanism
Initial architectures are defined by three key aspects of morphogenesis: morphology, fabric, and accretion mechanism. These aspects of morphogenesis vary across tidal zones (supratidal, intertidal, and subtidal) in response to water depth. Morphologies include sheet mats and discrete microbial buildups, fabrics have clotted and laminated textures, and accretion mechanisms involve agglutination and/or micrite precipitation. Field photographs, slab images, and thin sections illustrating variations in morphology, fabric, and accretion mechanism observed in the Hamelin Pool microbialites are provided in Supplementary Figs 6, 7, and 8, respectively. All microbialites from Hamelin Pool are composed of three main geochemical fractions: organic matter, micrite, and trapped-and-bound allochem grains (T&B allochems). A fourth geochemical fraction is siliciclastic grains (Supplementary Fig. 5), which were intentionally not digested in our sequential leaching protocol and thus excluded from this diagram.
