The Snowball period is confirmed on earth.

in Popular STEM5 hours ago

The Snowball period is confirmed on earth.



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One of the crucial moments in the history of life on Earth, about 700 million years ago, the Earth cooled so much that scientists believe that huge sheets of ice enveloped the entire planet like a gigantic snowball, it was not an age of ice, the ice age as the last one that arrived the ice could reach up to in Europe, it reached up to London up to that area, up to that height more or less, in the United States it reached up to New York and Chicago were covered with ice, but barely It dropped a little more, that is, in the equatorial zone there were still jungles, there were still deserts and there were still warm areas where life thrived, for example, and with the drop in sea level the lands between Australia and the Asian continent were emerged. and there was a large area with a very almost Tropical climate where humans thrived and in fact there were several human species at that time, in that place.


But about the snowball earth, we wouldn't have survived there, well we would have survived underground, but we wouldn't have been able to be on the surface, it would be an ice age. Totally there would be nothing left, life could survive in the oceans, yes, but in this hypothesis of the snowball earth where all these years various evidence and pieces have been collected, there was still one piece that was missing.


There was data about what was happening within the continents and in the equatorial regions, so there were doubts about whether it was really covered by all the ice or if the equatorial region was at least free of ice and even if it was a cold climate, at least there would be pastures. and waters free of floating icebergs, perhaps the earth was not a complete snowball, but rather had a belt suitable for life that would have been freed from the cold, that doubt remained.



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There is new research that was published on November 11 in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of geologists has found the missing link from that time, they have found an unusual sandstone rock with pebbles encapsulated within the granite that forms the Pikes Peak in Colorado United States, this specific rock is created by sedimentation, it is not that it was on the peak of a mountain, what we could imagine is that it was on a mountain and there the ice acted on that rock to create due to sedimentation, this data is important.


Researchers believe that these sediments were created like this, mixed and pressured by a gigantic mass of ice. The question they had was what era this piece is from and they have finally managed to date it to 635 million years, which is fair. in that era of the snowball earth, which is now beginning to be called the cryogenic period, due to the cold that was evidently there.


It is known that this rock was in a region that was part of the so-called continent Laurentia or Laurentia and that at that time it was close to the equator, so the researchers conclude that there were enormous glaciers on the continents in the Equator, the entire land was one huge snowball.




Terrifying time, we do not know why this snowball occurred, before the earth had a tropical climate, warmer, there would be its poles, there were cycles, we are talking about it happened 700 million years ago, calculate that 3000 million years ago life It started approximately, life was bacteria and the earth had its climate cycles but basically it was a much warmer, much more pleasant climate and suddenly for some reason there was this mega glaciation, this cooling of the planet globally, it is suspected that there was another former but the one we have the most data about is this one from about 600 - 700 million years ago.


It is not known why it happened, there are theories that the sun went through a cycle where it shone less, that we went through an Interstellar cloud, that the Earth was involved in an asteroid that collided or that was destroyed and that then some rings of dust They covered the earth, which had acted as an umbrella, preventing the sun's rays from entering the surface and therefore cooling the planet, and we do not know if it will happen in the future.




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