University of Miami students Brooke Vitek, Thalles Araujo, and Jacob Norry spent two weeks at the Darby Island Research station studying sedimentation in tropical marine environments. They compared and and contrasted grain size, grain composition and mineralogy of sediments in sand flats, sea grass beds, grapestones, ooid shoals, coral reefs, stromatolites, and hypersaline ponds, and mapped facies in a variety of nearshore settings. The overall goal was to assess the potential for differentiating these environments in ancient rocks based on sediments. Surprisingly, the Anaconda salt pond, which was highly anoxic and sulphuric in June, seems to be recovering. Firm cyanobacterial mats are reestablishing on the surface of the pond.
