All articles tagged with #snowballearth
During Earth's Snowball Earth period, iron-oxide records indicate subglacial seawater cooled to about -15°C, kept liquid by hypersaline brines up to four times saltier than modern oceans. Researchers used iron isotopes as a thermometer to estimate both temperature and salinity of ancient sea pockets formed during the Sturtian glaciation, suggesting an extraordinary cold but still-liquid briny ocean beneath global ice.
Fossils of seaweed found in black shale in China's Hubei Province indicate that habitable marine environments were more widespread during the Cryogenian Period than previously known, when Earth twice froze over with runaway glaciation. The findings support the idea that it was more of a "Slushball Earth" where the earliest forms of complex life - basic multicellular organisms - endured even at mid-latitudes previously thought to have been frozen solid. The Cryogenian freeze was much worse than the most recent Ice Age that humans survived, ending roughly 10,000 years ago.