A research duo from The University of Texas at Austin and UT Dallas have put forward a hypothesis that links the dawn of plate tectonics with “snowball Earth”–a period of […]
snowball earth
Posted inHabitable Zones, Press Release
Habitable Snowballs: Generalizing the Habitable Zone
Habitable planetary are commonly imagined to be temperate planets like Earth, with areas of open ocean and warm land. In contrast, planets with colder surfaces and permanent snowball states, where […]
Posted inHabitable Zones, Press Release
A Perfect Storm of Fire and Ice May Have Led to Snowball Earth
What caused the largest glaciation event in Earth’s history, known as ‘snowball Earth’? Geologists and climate scientists have been searching for the answer for years but the root cause of […]
Posted inBiogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Press Release
Explosive Volcanism Drove Major Changes in Snowball Earth Ocean Chemistry
Around 720-640 million years ago, much of the Earth’s surface was covered in ice during a glaciation that lasted millions of years. Explosive underwater volcanoes were a major feature of […]
Posted inAtmospheres, Climate, Weather, Press Release
Snowball Earth Might Be Slushy
Imagine a world without liquid water just solid ice in all directions. It would certainly not be a place that most life forms would like to live. And yet our […]
Posted inBiogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Cryobiology, Extinction events, Fossils & Paleontology, Icy Worlds, Status Report
Fossils Explain How Life Coped During Snowball Earth
Researchers have discovered what they think are fossils of a unique red algae species that lived about 650 million years ago during a brief respite between some of the most […]
Posted inHabitable Zones
Understanding Snowball Earth
During vast ice ages millions of years ago, sheets of glaciers stretched from the poles almost to the equator, covering the Earth in a frozen skin. Conditions on the “snowball […]
Posted inAtmospheres, Climate, Weather, Biogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Gaia - Planetary Perspectives, Icy Worlds, Press Release
Early Earth May Have Been Prone to Deep Freezes
Two University of Colorado Boulder researchers who have adapted a three-dimensional, general circulation model of Earth’s climate to a time some 2.8 billion years ago when the sun was significantly […]