Abstract

A combination of both water chemistry and sedimentological information was used to investigate the carbonate-producing mechanism in Littlefield Lake, a small lake located in Isabella County, central Michigan. Data on temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) saturation, alkalinity, calcium, and magnesium were obtained on a monthly basis over a 13-month period, with each parameter determined at 1m intervals over a depth range of 20m. The loss of dissolved carbon dioxide (CO₂) from warm surface waters during direct degassing, and to a lesser extent during photosynthetic uptake by lacustrine macrophytes and phytoplankton during the summer, results in massive precipitation of the low-magnesium calcite which predominates in all Littlefield Lake sedimentary facies However, despite the fact that carbonate precipitation in this rather typical temperate-region marl lake is directly related to, and may be driven by, seasonal variation in these physiochemical parameters, most calcite forms as encrustations around cyanophytic and chlorophytic macrophytes. Such relationships demonstrate that carbonate precipitation in marl lakes may result from complex interactions between both biochemical and physiochemical processes. As such, marl formation in this, and probably many other calcareous lake systems, can not be simply ascribed to one or the other of these two general mechanisms.