Not Snowball Earth, More of a Slushball Earth - by spacewriter
Recent evidence found in China is changing that “Snowball Earth” view. Algeo is part of a team of geoscientists from China, the United Kingdom, and the United States who are analyzing those rock cores. They discovered that habitable open-ocean conditions were more extensive during that time than everyone assumed. This was true for oceans that lay between the tropics and the polar regions.
Huyue Song from the China University of Geosciences and the first author of a paper about slushball Earth, said while deep water likely did not contain oxygen to support life during this period, the shallow seas did. “We present a new Snowball Earth model in which open waters existed in both low- and mid-latitude oceans,” Song said, noting that the ice age probably had many periods of freezing and melting over the span of 15 million years.
An example of microalgae called Nannochloropsis, to give an idea of the type of organism in the slushball earth study. Courtesy CSIRO. That same warming by life forms probably contributed to the end of the Marinoan, said Algeo. Life flourishing in those shallow ocean regions released a lot of carbon dioxide, which warmed the atmosphere and contributed to glacial thaw. “One of the general take-home messages is how much the biosphere can influence the carbon cycle and climate,” he said. “We know that carbon dioxide is one of the most important greenhouse gases.
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