Diatoms of North America
Indigo Heine
Taxon Contributor
Ph.D. Candidate University of Colorado Boulder
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow mountaineers.” -John Muir
I am a chemical oceanographer and new diatom enthusiast, who got interested in diatoms via my Ph.D. research on the coastal marine silicon cycle. I received my B.Sc. From the University of California Santa Barbara in chemistry in 2022. I’m currently studying reverse weathering, a chemical reaction that consumes alkalinity and cations (Si, Fe, Al, Li, K) and forms an alumino-silicate gel on the surface of diatom frustules in river deltas. Because this reaction emits CO2 and consumes cations, it is thought to moderate ocean chemistry and as well as global climate on timescales of millions of years, or less. By using a mass balance approach and stable silicon isotopes, I am working to constrain the magnitude and significance of this reaction in several major river deltas: the Gulf of Papua (New Guinea), the Amazon-Guianas system, and the Mississippi-Atchafalaya delta.