1 A re-examination of the mechanism of whiting events: A new role 2 for diatoms in Fayetteville Green Lake (New York, USA) 3 Short running title: Re-examining whiting events in Fayetteville Green Lake 4 Authors and affiliations: 5 Chloe Stanton1, Julie Cosmidis1,2,*, and Lee R. Kump1,2 6 1Department of Geosciences, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, 7 USA 8 2Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, 9 PA 16802, USA 10 *Current address: Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 03N, UK 11 12 Correspondence: 13 Julie Cosmidis, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 03N, UK. 14 Email:
[email protected]. 15 Twitter : @JCosmidis 16 17 Key words: 18 Whitings, biomineralization, diatoms, calcite, micrite, ACC 19 20 21 This article is a non-peer reviewed preprint submitted to EarthArXiv. 22 It was submitted to Geobiology for peer review. 1 23 ABSTRACT 24 Whiting events – the episodic precipitation of fine-grained suspended calcium cabonates 25 in the water column – have been documented across a variety of marine and lacustrine 26 environments. Whitings likely are a major source of carbonate muds, a constituent of limestones, 27 and important archives for geochemical proxies of Earth history. While several biological and 28 physical mechanisms have been proposed to explain the onset of these precipitation events, no 29 consensus has been reached thus far. Fayetteville Green Lake (New York, USA), is a meromictic 30 lake that experiences annual whitings. Materials suspended in the water column collected through 31 the whiting season were characterized using scanning electron microscopy and scanning 32 transmission X-ray microscopy.