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A mineral perspective on biominerals as recorders of trace element and environmental signals
Many organisms form their hard parts (skeletons, shells) out of mineral-organic composites called biominerals. In aquatic settings, as a shell or skeleton grows over time, each new layer traps the environmental conditions of the surrounding lake or seawater (temperature, chemical signals, etc.) in the form of trace elements and isotope signatures. Paleoclimatologists depend on these biominerals and their proxy signals as recorders of past environments and as windows into the future. The mechanisms by which these biominerals form is a topic of healthy debate and essential for understanding how these empirically-based trace element and geochemical proxies work, yet, relatively little has been done to explore biominerals from a mineralogical perspective. In this seminar, I will overview the work that my group has done to tie together trace element and oxygen isotope signals with crystal structure and crystal bonding measurements in modern coral skeletons and mollusk nacre (mother of pearl). The goal is to better understand how organisms trap signals in their minerals in order to assess the fidelity of paleoproxies and predict future biomineralization scenarios.
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