Earth's moon may not be critical to life

The Moon has long been viewed as a crucial component in creating an environment suitable for the evolution of complex life on Earth, but a number of scientific results in recent years have shown that perhaps our planet doesn't ...

Rock weathering may have led to 'Snowball Earth'

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers conducting a field study in the Mackenzie Mountains in northwest Canada is suggesting rock weathering almost a billion years ago, may have led to the entire planet being encased in ice ...

Researchers find new information about 'Snowball Earth' period

It is rather difficult to imagine, but approximately 635 million years ago, ice may have covered a vast portion of our planet in an event called "Snowball Earth." According to the Snowball Earth hypothesis, the massive ice ...

Clouds could explain how Snowball Earth thawed out

Glaciation events during the Neoproterozoic (524-to-1,000 million years ago) and Paleoproterozoic (1,600-to-2,500 million years ago) periods - events that spawned ice ages that persisted for millions of years at a time - ...

Extreme climate change linked to early animal evolution

An international team of scientists, including geochemists from the University of California, Riverside, has uncovered new evidence linking extreme climate change, oxygen rise, and early animal evolution.

Interglacial on snowball Earth

Researchers from Royal Holloway, University of London have discovered that ice retreated completely through the glaciations.

The oldest evidence of bioturbation on Earth

The Ediacaran Period, an interval in Earth's history after the Snowball Earth glaciations but before the Cambrian radiations, marks the introduction of complex macroscopic organisms synchronously in unrelated groups. It has ...

What really happened prior to 'Snowball Earth'?

In a study published in the journal Geology, scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science suggest that the large changes in the carbon isotopic composition of carbonates which ...

Snowball Earth hypothesis challenged

The hypothesis that the Earth was completely covered in ice 635 million years ago has received a serious blow. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 during that period was much lower than previously thought, according to a ...

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