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Christine Chen examining stony deposits called tufas.

Christine Chen examining stony deposits called tufas.
Christine Chen examining stony deposits called tufas.
Christine Chen examining stony deposits called tufas.
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Christine Chen examining stony deposits called tufas.
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02/16/2015
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Caption from Oceanus magazine, Vol. 52, No. 1, pg. 31:
Graduate student Christine Chen examines stony deposits called tufas on a dried-up shoreline of a lake in the Andes Mountains in Chile. Tufas are fossilized remnants of algal reefs that thrived when the lakes were larger. Arrows on this satellite image indicate the location of the ancient shorelines, which form a bathtub-ring pattern.
Image Of the Day caption:
Christine Chen examines stony deposits called tufas on an ancient lakeshore in the central Andes Mountains, northern Chile. Chen, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, visited there in 2015 to study the dry lakes, once rain-fed, for clues to the area's past climate and water balance. The tufas are fossilized remnants of algal reefs that formed concentric "bathtub rings" as the lake shores receded some tens of thousands of years ago. Back in the lab, Chen analyzes the tufas' composition to determine when the reefs lived and when the lakes, lacking rain, shrank and disappeared.
Photo courtesy of Christine Chen
© Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
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