• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Earth’s Greatest Ice Age Really Did Bring Ice Sheets To The Equator

November 12, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Immense glaciers once covered the entire Earth, reaching even the equator, geologists have confirmed. The discovery that this also applied in the center of continents, where conditions would have been very dry deepens the mystery of where and how life survives.

Geologists learned of the existence of recent ice ages by finding the legacy of glaciers much further from the poles or high mountains than occur today. Yet when they started finding far more ancient hints of glaciers in even more tropical regions, they were skeptical. It seemed implausible the planet had ever been cold enough that thick sheets of ice could have reached the equator. Nevertheless, as more and more examples were found, the idea of Snowball Earth was born.

Advertisement

Once a somewhat fringe theory, it is now widely accepted that Earth had at least two, and possibly more, snowball eras. Yet while it is now accepted the Earth was some 60°C (110°F) colder than today, questions have remained as to whether the continental interiors, where precipitation would have been very low, were also icebound.

Evidence of recent glaciation in Colorado would not surprise many people. Today it is almost midway between the equator and the poles and raised by the Rocky Mountains. However, 661 million years ago was a different matter. Then the area was relatively flat and located at the equator. If ice reached there, back then, it could reach anywhere.

And ice there was, Dr Liam Courtney-Davies of the University of Colorado, Boulder and co-authors report. Mineral veins injected into sandstones are a sure sign of a combination of glacial pressure and geothermal heating, the authors argue. “A modern analog is provided by the Ross Embayment of Antarctica, where rift-related faults border sediment-filled basins, overpressurized fluids circulate in confined aquifers below ice,” they write.

A piece of A piece of dark red Tava rock formed when ancient ice sheets forced sediment into Earth’s crust in Colorado where iron-rich incursions occurred.

A piece of A piece of dark red Tava rock formed when ancient ice sheets forced sediment into Earth’s crust in Colorado where iron-rich incursions occurred.

Image Credit: Liam Courtney-Davies

Confirming Snowball Earth’s completeness requires getting the timing of deposits right. If a location had glaciers, but at times when continental drift placed it somewhere different, it may not be the proof required. The team used laser ablation mass spectrometry to measure heavy metals from Colorado’s Tavakaiv sandstones at sites west and south of Denver. Uranium-lead isotopic dating identified the rocks and their injections as 696 and 663 million years old.

Advertisement

“This study presents the first physical evidence that Snowball Earth reached the heart of continents at the equator,” Courtney-Davies said in a statement.

Most of what we know about Snowball Earth comes from what was then the margins of continents and nearby sedimentary basins, including recent evidence of how melting occurred as things ended. Nevertheless, questions have remained as to whether the entire planet froze, or if small refugia survived. If they didn’t, the question remains why life did not need to start again from scratch once the ice retreated.

The interior of continents are often dry, and get drier during ice ages, so one explanation is that, cold as they were, they didn’t freeze. However, finding sites that were tropical, low altitude, and far from continental margins at the relevant time, but whose geology is exposed, has been a challenge. The Colorado sites fit the bill, and the known presence of volcanic activity in Idaho around the same time makes the presence of geothermal sites plausible.

“You have the climate evolving, and you have life evolving with it. All of these things happened during Snowball Earth upheaval,” Courtney-Davies said. “We have to better characterize this entire time period to understand how we and the planet evolved together.” 

Advertisement

In particular, the challenge is to explain how life kept evolving when even the warmest and driest parts of the planet were covered in ice sheets so thick they could push the sandstones deep underground and force mineral veins into them.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Cricket-Manchester test likely to be postponed after India COVID-19 case
  2. EU to attend U.S. trade meeting put in doubt by French anger
  3. Soccer-West Ham win again, Leicester and Napoli falter
  4. Was Jesus A Hallucinogenic Mushroom? One Scholar Certainly Thought So

Source Link: Earth's Greatest Ice Age Really Did Bring Ice Sheets To The Equator

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • DNA From Greenland Sled Dogs – Maybe The World’s Oldest Breed – Reveals 1,000 Years Of Arctic History
  • Why Doesn’t Moonrise Shift By The Same Amount Each Night?
  • Moa De-Extinction, Fashionable Chimps, And Robot Surgery – No Human Required
  • “Human”: Powerful New Images Mark The Most Scientifically Accurate “Hyper-Real 3D Models Of Human Species Ever”
  • Did We Accidentally Leave Life On The Moon In 2019 – And Could We Revive It?
  • 1.8 Million Years Ago, Two Extinct Humans Had One Of The Gnarliest Deaths In History
  • “Powerful Image” Of One Of The World’s Rarest Tigers Exposes The Real Danger In Taman Negara
  • Evolution, Domestication, And A Lot Of Very Good Boys: How Wolves Became Dogs
  • Why Do Orcas Have White Spots Near Their Eyes?
  • Tomb Of First King Of Ancient Maya City Discovered In Belize
  • The Real Reason The Tip Of Your Tape Measure Wiggles Like That
  • The “Haunting” Last Message From NASA’s Opportunity Rover, Sent From Inside A Planet-Wide Storm
  • Adorable Video Proves Not All Gorillas Hate The Rain. It Might Even Win One A Mate
  • 5,000-Year-Old Rock Art May Show One Of Ancient Egypt’s First Rulers
  • Alzheimer’s-Linked Protein Levels “20 Times Higher” In Newborn Babies – What Does This Mean?
  • Americans Were Asked If They Thought Civil War Was Coming. The Results Were Unexpected
  • Voyager 1 & 2 Could Be Detected From Almost A Light-Year Away With Our Current Technology
  • Dams Have Nudged Earth’s Poles By Over 1 Meter In The Past 200 Years
  • This Sugar Could Be A Cure For Male Pattern Baldness – And It’s Been In Our Bodies All Along
  • “Cosmic Immigrants”: Daytime Star Seen In 1604 May Be An “Alien Type Ia Supernova”
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version