Climate warming has impacted stream ecosystems on a global scale. In permafrost regions, these impacts include thermokarst development, e.g. land subsidence due to permafrost thaw. When this subsidence occurs near streams, it increases stream sediment and nutrient loads by orders of magnitude, impacting downstream hydrology and ecology. Thermokarst is a major driver of landscape change in the Arctic, but few studies have addressed its impacts in Antarctica. This study examines the biotic impact of a 2012 thermokarst development in Crescent West, a glacial meltwater stream in the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MDV), Antarctica. We know this event caused changes to the stream channel geomorphology, substrate, and nutrient loads. We do not know how the biota, predominantly microbial mats, have responded to this disturbance. Two factors have contributed to this lack of information: mat biomass change in Crescent West has been studied on a transect (established 2013), but we have not had a scalable method of assessing landscape-scale biotic change; and we do not have data on these biota prior to 2012. To overcome these issues, we used remote sensing imagery and analysis to assess biotic coverage above and below the thermokarst origin. We calculated changes in areal biotic coverage for the period from 2010-2019, to capture both the immediate and longer-term biological response, and assessed biotic coverage in three nearby stream channels to control for basin-scale changes. We found no evidence of decreased biotic cover due to the thermokarst development. Instead, biotic cover increased >35% in both the impacted reach and across the basin in 2013. This indicates the influence of some other basin-scale covariable that season. It is also a testament to the resilience of the microbial mats in this polar desert, and may provide insight into ways these microbial mats will respond under a changing Antarctic climate.