Each month is a wash: blue for the water's mixing, gold for light, green for the diatom crop. In a temperate lake diatoms bloom in spring, when the water has mixed nutrients up from the bottom and the light returns; they sink and use up the dissolved silica, and the bloom collapses as summer layers the lake. A smaller autumn bloom often follows when the lake mixes again. The seed changes this year's weather.
LIT the seasonal pattern (spring diatom bloom, silica depletion, summer stratification, autumn overturn) is the textbook temperate-lake cycle (e.g. the PEG model, Sommer et al. 1986; Lund's Asterionella studies in Windermere). ANALOGY the curves are a simple model and the painting is simulated pigment bleed, not data from a real lake. Self-check: the diatom crop never exceeds what light and silica allow, and silica never goes negative. ← SaPpH{{i}}on
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