Our study in Laguna de Los Cisnes (Tierra del Fuego, Chile) shows how microbialites—carbonate buildups shaped by algae and microbes—form distinctive crater-like structures. By combining field surveys, microscopy, and satellite imagery, we demonstrate that the green alga Percursaria percursa plays a key role in lithifying algal communities, leaving tubular microfossils inside the rock. Environmental forces such as waves, wind-driven Langmuir cells, and lake-level changes then remodel this biogenic framework into diverse morphologies—mounds, columns, dishes, and elongated “wrinkles.”

This work challenges the long-standing idea that microbialite shapes are primarily dictated by physical processes. Instead, it highlights that biotic processes establish the fundamental architecture first, while environmental conditions only modify it. Laguna de Los Cisnes thus provides a rare natural laboratory where living and fossil microbialites reveal how life and environment have co-shaped carbonate ecosystems for the past 10,000 years

 Check our paper: https://doi.org/10.1111/sed.13189