We’d like to welcome Tyler Mackey to ASPIRE and congratulate him on being an ASPIRE faculty member! Tyler’s research explores the relationship between microbial ecosystems and sedimentary deposits past and present. Currently, he is focusing on Antarctic Lake environments, where active microbial mats coat the lake bottom and interact with siliciclastic sediments as well as influence the precipitation of chemical sediments like carbonates. Together, these biosedimentary deposits record information about the sensitivity of microbial ecosystems to climate change in the region, preserve indicators of past lake conditions, including through glacial-interglacial transitions, and provide analogs for ecosystems through transitional periodsin Earth history. Analysis of these deposits and interpretation of biogeochemical data requires a wide range of spatial tools and techniques, including analysis of mat characteristics and sediment geochemistry across basins, morphological characterization of surface through structure from motion photogrammetry of benthic microbial mats and 3D visualization of mat-sediment interactions from X-ray computed tomography.

Learn more about Tyler from his website