At least twice in Earth’s history, nearly the entire planet was encased in a sheet of snow and ice. These dramatic “Snowball Earth” events occurred in quick succession, somewhere around 700 million years ago, and evidence suggests that the consecutive global ice ages set the stage for the subsequent explosion of complex, multicellular life on Earth.
Scientists have considered multiple scenarios for what may have tipped the planet into each ice age. While no single driving process has been identified, it’s assumed that whatever triggered the temporary freeze-overs must have done so in a way that pushed the planet past a critical threshold, such as reducing incoming sunlight or atmospheric carbon dioxide to levels low enough to set off a global expansion of ice.
But MIT scientists now say that Snowball Earths were likely the product of “rate-induced glaciations.” That is, they found the Earth can be tipped into a global ice age when the level of solar radiation it receives changes quickly over a geologically short period of time. The amount of solar radiation doesn’t have to drop to a particular threshold point; as long as the decrease in incoming sunlight occurs faster than a critical rate, a temporary glaciation, or Snowball Earth, will follow. ...
Routes to Global Glaciation ~ Constantin W. Arnscheidt, Daniel H. Rothman
Proceedings of the Royal Society A 476(2239):0303 (July 2020) DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2020.0303
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alive to the gentle breeze of communication, and please stop being such a jerk. — Garrison Keillor
<<The Snowball Earth hypothesis proposes that during one or more of Earth's icehouse climates, Earth's surface became entirely or nearly entirely frozen, sometime earlier than 650 Mya during the Cryogenian period. Proponents of the hypothesis argue that it best explains sedimentary deposits generally regarded as of glacial origin at tropical palaeolatitudes and other enigmatic features in the geological record. Opponents of the hypothesis contest the implications of the geological evidence for global glaciation and the geophysical feasibility of an ice- or slush-covered ocean and emphasize the difficulty of escaping an all-frozen condition. A number of unanswered questions remain, including whether the Earth was a full snowball, or a "slushball" with a thin equatorial band of open (or seasonally open) water. The snowball-Earth episodes are proposed to have occurred before the sudden radiation of multicellular bioforms known as the Cambrian explosion. The most recent snowball episode may have triggered the evolution of multicellularity. Another, much earlier and longer snowball episode, the Huronian glaciation, which would have occurred 2400 to 2100 Mya, may have been triggered by the first appearance of oxygen in the atmosphere, the "Great Oxygenation Event".>>
The MIT article title "Study: A plunge in incoming sunlight may have triggered “Snowball Earths” could be mistakenly read as if they where suggesting that the Sun's output dropped, causing snowball periods, but that wasn't the case. They talk about the level of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface dropping due to Earthly atmospheric changes.
Ultimately, they found that a planet was more likely to freeze over if incoming solar radiation decreased quickly, at a rate that was faster than a critical rate, rather than to a critical threshold, or particular level of sunlight. There is some uncertainty in exactly what that critical rate would be, as the model is a simplified representation of the Earth’s climate. Nevertheless, Arnscheidt estimates that the Earth would have to experience about a 2 percent drop in incoming sunlight over a period of about 10,000 years to tip into a global ice age.
“It’s reasonable to assume past glaciations were induced by geologically quick changes to solar radiation,” Arnscheidt says.
The particular mechanisms that may have quickly darkened the skies over tens of thousands of years is still up for debate. One possibility is that widespread volcanoes may have spewed aerosols into the atmosphere, blocking incoming sunlight around the world. Another is that primitive algae may have evolved mechanisms that facilitated the formation of light-reflecting clouds.
The results from this new study suggest scientists may consider processes such as these, that quickly reduce incoming solar radiation, as more likely triggers for Earth’s ice ages.
Just as zero is not equal to infinity, everything coming from nothing is illogical.
