I am working on my doctorate thesis and I was intrigued by the kind of images bellow. I have no idea of what this beautiful flower shape is. This is a SEM analysis image from a slow sand filter media using lake water sampled in spring. I do not know if it is a microorganism, part of some organism or either some king of deposit. Does someone please have any idea of what it is? I searched all around and could not find an answer.
For me it looks like a crystal. Evaporating lake water left some deposits. But if you see a lot of things exactly like this one, then I could be wrong.
Similar six-fold shaper were reported in DOI: 10.1080/01490450590945889 (fig 3b) as fe-oxide precipitates, but it is worth to check the possibility of aragonite precipitates (they tend to crystallise as hexagonal cyclic twins - sometimes in SEM they can be misidentified also as calcite precipitates due chemical composition, so it is worth to expand the search).
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