It makes you wonder what created all that CO2 millions of years ago.
From Louisiana State University
LSU 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 age that occurred before animal life appeared, when Earth’s landmasses were most likely clustered near the equator, precipitated relatively rapid changes in atmospheric conditions and a subsequent greenhouse heat wave. This particular period of extensive glaciation and subsequent climate changes might have supplied the cataclysmic event that gave rise to modern levels of atmospheric oxygen, paving the way for the rise of animals and the diversification of life during the later Cambrian explosion.
But if ice covered the earth all the way to the tropics during what is known as the Marinoan glaciation, how did the planet spring back from the brink of an ice apocalypse? Huiming Bao, Charles L. Jones Professor in Geology & Geophysics at LSU, might have some of the answers.
Bao and LSU graduate students Bryan Killingsworth and Justin Hayles, together with Chuanming Zhou, a colleague at Chinese Academy of Sciences, had an article published on Feb. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, that provides new clues on the duration of what was a significant change in atmospheric conditions following the Marinoan glaciation.
“The story is to put a time limit on how fast our Earth system can recover from a total frozen state,” Bao said. “It is about a unique and rapidly changing post-glacial world, but is also about the incredible resilience of life and life’s remarkable ability to restore a new balance between atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere after a global glaciation.”
Bao’s group went about investigating the post-glaciation period of Snowball Earth by looking at unique occurrences of “crystal fans” of a common mineral known as barite (BaSO4), deposited in rocks following the Marinoan glaciation. Out of the three stable isotopes of oxygen, O-16, O-17 and O-18, Bao’s group pays close attention to the relatively scarce isotope O-17. According to Killingsworth, there aren’t many phenomena on earth that can change the normally expected ratio of the scare isotope O-17 to more abundant isotope O-18. However, in sulfate minerals such as barite in rock samples from around 635 million years ago, Bao’s group finds large deviations in the normal ratio of O-17 to O-18 with respect to O-16 isotopes.
“If something unusual happens with the composition of the atmosphere, the oxygen isotope ratios can change,” Killingsworth said. “We see a large deviation in this ratio in minerals deposited around 635 million years ago. This occurred during an extremely odd time in atmospheric history.”
According to Bao’s group, the odd oxygen isotope ratios they find in barite samples from 635 million years ago could have occurred if, following the extensive Snowball Earth glaciation, Earth’s atmosphere had very high levels of carbon dioxide, or CO2. An ultra-high carbon dioxide atmosphere, Killingsworth explains, where CO2 levels match levels of atmospheric oxygen, would grab more O-17 from oxygen. This would cause a depletion of the O-17 isotope in air and subsequently in barite minerals, which incorporate oxygen as they grow. Bao’s group has found worldwide deposits of this O-17 depleted sulfate mineral in rocks dating from the global glaciation event 635 million years ago, indicating an episode of an ultra-high carbon dioxide atmosphere following the Marinoan glaciation.
“Something significant happened in the atmosphere,” Killingsworth said. “This kind of an atmospheric shift in carbon dioxide is not observed during any other period of Earth’s history. And now we have sedimentary rock evidence for how long this ultra-high carbon dioxide period lasted.”
By using available radiometric dates from areas near layers of barite deposits, Bao’s group has been able to come up with an estimate for the duration of what is now called the Marinoan Oxygen-17 Depletion, or MOSD, event. Bao’s group estimates the MOSD duration at 0 – 1 million years.
“This is, so far, really the best estimate we could get from geological records, in line with previous models of how long an ultra-high carbon dioxide event could last before the carbon dioxide in the air would get drawn back into the oceans and sediments,” Killingsworth said.
Normally, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are in balance with levels of carbon dioxide in the ocean. However, if water and air were cut off by a thick layer of ice during Snowball Earth, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could have increased drastically. In a phenomenon similar to the climate change Earth is witnessing in modern times, high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide would have created a greenhouse gas warming effect, trapping heat inside the planet’s atmosphere and melting the Marinoan ice. Essentially, the Marinoan glaciation created the potential for extreme changes in atmospheric chemistry that in turn lead to the end of Snowball Earth and the beginning of a new explosion of animal life on Earth.
While previous work by Bao’s group had advanced the interpretation of the strange occurrence of O-17 depleted barite just after the Marinoan glaciation, there was still much uncertainty on the duration of ultra-high CO2 levels after meltdown of Snowball Earth. Bao’s discovery of a field site with many barite layers gave the opportunity to track how oxygen isotope ratios changed through a thickness of sedimentary rock. As the pages in a novel can be thought of as representing time, so layers of sedimentary rock represent geological history. However, these rock “pages” represented an unknown duration of time for the MOSD event. By using characteristic features of the Marinoan rock sequence occurring regionally in South China, Bao’s group linked the barite layer site to other sites in the region that did have precise dates from volcanic ash beds. Bao’s group has succeeded in estimating the duration of the MOSD event, and thus the time it took for Earth to restore “normal” CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
“To some extent, our findings demonstrate that whatever happens to Earth, she will recover, and recover at a rapid pace,” Bao said. “Mother Earth lived and life carried on even in the most devastating situation. The only difference is the life composition afterwards. In other words, whatever humans do to the Earth, life will go on. The only uncertainty is whether humans will still remain part of the life composition.”
Bao says that he had been interested in this most intriguing episode of Earth’s history since Paul Hoffman, Dan Schrag and colleagues revived the Snowball Earth hypothesis in 1998.
“I was a casual ‘non-believer’ of this hypothesis because of the mere improbability of such an Earth state,” Bao said. “There was nothing rational or logic in that belief for me, of course. I remember I even told my job interviewers back in 2000 that one of my future research plans was to prove that the Snowball Earth hypothesis was wrong.”
However, during a winter break in 2006, Bao obtained some unusual data from barite, a sulfate mineral dating from the Snowball Earth period that he received from a colleague in China.
“I started to develop my own method to explore this utterly strange world,” Bao said. “Now, it seems that our LSU group is the one offering the strongest supporting evidence for a ‘Snowball Earth’ back 635 million years ago. I certainly did not see this coming. The finding we published in 2008 demonstrates, again, that new scientific breakthroughs are often brought in by outsiders.”
Bao credits his research ideas, analytical work and pleasure of working on this project to his two graduate students, Killingsworth and Hayles, as well as his long-time Chinese collaborators. Bao brought Killingsworth and Hayles to an interior mountainous region in South China in December 2011, where the group succeeded in finding multiple barite layers in a section of rocks dating to 635 million years ago. This discovery formed a large part of their analysis and subsequent publication in PNAS.
“Nothing can beat the intellectual excitement and satisfaction you get from research in the field and in the laboratory,” Bao said.
Bao’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
To read the original article, visit http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/02/05/1213154110.1.abstract.
To read more about Huiming Bao’s research, visit http://www.geol.lsu.edu/hbao/.
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Decompose?
How? Perhaps the relatively infinitesmal amounts of organic material oxidize on their own? Decomposition as commonly understood is a cycle of life process where life consumes life. Otherwise life’s liquid components (minerals or chemicals if one prefers) are either washed away or the water is evaporated and the precipitates become part of erosion. It took heat and pressure to convert plant/animal matter into coal (metamorphosis). Without animal/plant consuming dead things we’d just have buried dead things.
– One thing is certain, if mankind converting stores of buried carbon into energy and CO2 over decades affects the climate so little that CO2 physics is expected faith, but unproven idealogy. At least until mankind develops better physical science (not models); then cyanobacteria and their perhaps yet unknown relatives would require eras/eons to convert all of that CO2 back into minerals (cyanobacteria are thought to have required billions (astronomical term is eons) of years to convert earth to an oxygen atmosphere originally)…
– Don’t forget that causing that very high levels of CO2 atmosphere while the earth is supposedly under several kilometers of ice, even by self decomposing critters would require eons also…
– As mentioned there is no identification of the beginning, concurrent or consecutive events surrounding snowball earth. Sure makes one wonder just where their CO2 proof or even far fetched possibility arises from.
Increasing CO2 levels from the oceans is a strong possibility as the ice melts and the water vents excess CO2 to maintain equilibrium balance. Remember, the CO2 equilibrium level in salt water falls as the temperature rises. But with such a high level of atmospheric CO2, just how high can the percentage go and how much CO2 is required to change it? One thing is clear, atmospheric CO2 levels will not quickly decline when ice melts.
One of the theories often stated to initially cause ‘snowball earth’ is the aggregation of continental crust causing a disruption of earth’s currents allowing frozen gaia. I have quite some difficulty understanding how 75% of earth’s surface as uninterrupted water having difficulty forming strong convection currents. That whole bit about cold dense ocean water sinking and warm water filling in…
And the whole volcano thing erupting huge amounts of CO2? Just where did the CO2 come from? Nowadays it is believed (that faith word again) that subducted calcium carbonates (fossil critter skeletons) are the primary source of the CO2 when the mineral CaCO2 is decomposed under heat and pressure. I guess they’ll have to invent scenarios to stoke the volcanos with CO2 in frozen gaia land as copious cubic miles of subducted calcium carbonates might be unlikely 670 MYA.
Theory theory theory upon theory and then modeled based on assumptions. I’m convinced… not! /sarc
Why? My understanding of water currents is that their causes are many; but earth’s temperature modifing ocean currents have the main driver as warm water flowing in over cold water sinking. Does that change in snowball earth?
The Continents coalescing in antarctica’s position might (another of those loose words) allow a large south pole ice cap (assuming that magnetic south as defined by today’s poles). why would that cause a North ice cap of any size?
‘Coriolis’ effect, glaciers spreading out across open water by gravity or even the ocean water freezing across such vast reaches; are interesting explanations to me… Angular momentum over a sphere would… do what to encourage iceball earth?
How does the coriolis effect help make a snowball earth? Is there an assumption that ocean currents become exclusively parallel to latitudes? If we look around for a current model for water motion we can turn to the atmosphere. I suppose all winds will eventually be parallel to latitudes? Intermixing of cold/warm water I’d expect as similar to atmospheric cold/warm air mixing.
Supposing, just for argument purpose, that the currents did somehow become parallel to latitude. I suppose there is firm erosional evidence of such currents? Are these current presumed to circle the world? Given that the heat/cooling effects are withdrawn that returning underwater currents do not exist? And these waters are supposed to freeze solid? Did I forget to mention tides? Tides and currents serve to break up ice, especially at the higher latitudes where tidal change is greatest. atmospheric winds and ocean currents circling the earth would also be detrimental to oceans freezing solid.
Then there are the undersea mounts, rift zones, hot spots, trenches…
– – – – – – – –
atheok,
You appear to be correct.
Assuming the life in the pre-Cambrian ocean was basically bacterial-like and not plant-like, it’s decomposition would release only incidental amounts of CO2.
I was thinking, incorrectly that the pre-Cambrian ocean had some significant plant-like life which involves CO2 release during decomposition.
Thanks.
John
FUBAR of the first order, if the image is any indication.
Why? Because they show the high elevations snow-free.
Do I have to explain it? I don’t think so.
Thanks for drawing my attention to this, Anthony. I’ll have a read. This time in the evolution of a habitable Earth is of considerable interest to me. We have some rocks of this age in NW Wales that a bunch of geologists are currently working on.
The illustration appears to be the current globe with a snow job. Looking at South America on the bottom with the Andes snow free. You can see Baja California a bit farther up. Cheers –
I highly suggest that people go back and read the important papers in this debate. There is a lot more to this hypothesis than was discussed in the paper mentioned above.
That being said, I find anything involving oxygen isotope ratios from this period of time to be immediately suspect. One of the observations made consistently in the early literature is oxygen isotope ratios are notoriously unreliable in these sediments. The only pattern found is chaos. The most interesting observation , however, is a consistent negative Carbon 13 to Carbon 12 ratio in the cap carbonates above the glacial sediments. The carbonates also have some very odd sedimentary features.
I wish I could find my personal file. I used to have all the important early papers in this argument. I tend towards scepticism on the hypothesis personally, but there is also too many odd observations for me to completely rule the hypothesis out.
A snowball Earth could have in excess of 50% albedo with reasonably fresh snow. A quick look at a 50% albedo energy balance gives an average surface T of about -40C assuming no atmospheric blocking. As long as the albedo stays high, it stays very cold. However, volcanic ash and space dust and aging ice will potentially start to warm areas up and where it gets warm enough to melt the ice, the albedo can start dropping and eventually comes the thaw, at least at lower latitudes.
Our modern glaciation periods don’t really go beyond about 100,000 yrs before we reach an interglacial. Perhaps massive concentrations of co2 shorten the time significantly. I doubt the snowball Earth could have maintained total cover for very long because there is an awful lot of solar energy coming at the equatorial regions and sooner or later new snow turns to old ice and even ponds which start to become very low albedo. Deep ocean albedo tends to be under 0.04 at solar incidence angles that matter. That means most of the energy incoming is absorbed and there’s no clouds to reduce the effect until you start losing that total ice cover.
[Mods: please delete my 1:57 pm and use this with repaired blockquote. Thanks.]
A Reference on Paleo atmospheres.
ATMOSPHERIC OXYGEN, GIANT PALEOZOIC INSECTS AND THE EVOLUTION OF
AERIAL LOCOMOTOR PERFORMANCE
ROBERT DUDLEY*
The Journal of Experimental Biology 201, 1043–1050 (1998)
http://jeb.biologists.org/content/201/8/1043.full.pdf
Fig. 1 Estimates of Phanerozoic oxygen and carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations from Berner (1990, 1994) and Berner and Canfield (1989); see Berner (1997) for a summary of independent geochemical estimates of Proterozoic carbon dioxide concentrations. …
Peak CO2 = 0.55% in Late Cambrian
O2 is 15% Cambrian-Devonian, rising to 35% (peak) late Carboniferous crashing to 15% end of Permian.
I don’t see a justification for constant nitrogen partial pressures over time. So his atmospheric density runs parallel with O2 partial pressures. He works with an early Paleozoic atmosphere is “Hypodense”, less than today (his Table 1)
The amount of nitrates, limestone and coal in the ground leads me toward much higher Paleozoic atmospheric pressures before these rocks were deposited.
But I do have to wonder if it is even possible for a Snowball Earth if we had a 10+ bar atmosphere. Even with an SO2 Catastrophe somehow made airborne, does a Snowball require a thin atmosphere?
Wouldn’t you have to know what caused snowball Earth in the first place to be able to tell how it ended? For all we know a big rock hit, kicked up a bunch of junk in the atmosphere, and cooled everything down and as it settled out, things warmed up. I know, probably much too simple for a grant huh? What kills this article for me is the underlying warming theme… that ol co2 did something it’s actually not doing now.. but hey if it did it then just imagine what high co2 can do if it isn’t snowball earth. In a backdoor sort of way, it is no different than Hansen’s Earth will be Venus someday claim.
Not incorrect John. Tough to be incorrect about someone else’s speculative ideas. Just not given all relevant details so that you can make a true judgement call. As another long term poster at WUWT would say, “this doesn’t pass the smell test”, the details why only confirm the suspicion. A suspicion that if I read your posts correctly you already have; you’re just giving the theory room to grow, if the researchers can prove validity. I admire your open thoughts; only I hear their PR as another way of researchers saying they want more funding to prove their speculation.
My thoughts lean towards the word ‘bogus’ until the researchers return and as you pointed out above, present a complete picture of events with proofs for start, continuation and end of frozen earth time. Plus all major issues that bother us silly geologist types such as Dan the Geologist’s concern above. I agree with Dan, only I have problems with barite remaining unchanged over 670MYA. I’ll ask about ratios when the mineral is proved to be original 670MYA old depositions and that all relevant samples around the world are near identical.
Perhaps when Dan finds his files he can post relevant information, questions, answers and thoughts that he has in his files?
It is simple to think of the ocean as a simple body of water, land as a lump of dirt/rock, air as something immediate about us and earth’s core as something that occasionally burps a volcano.
Taking the time to step back and ask about our planet, biosphere and solar system as a whole is something the CAGWers seem determined not to do. especially when one throws in the surrounding cosmos. Our earth may be small as planets go, but it is incredibly huge as mankind goes. Man’s largest dents to earth’s surface are small surface pertubations easily eroded away over geological time.
When taking an air flight I am always absorbed in the distance to ground image during take off and landing. At what heights do we lose sight of people, cars, trucks, houses… The surprising thing is that much detail gets lost in the background quite quickly. Taking that thought and wondering if we lose sight of all that within five-seven miles and there are many miles of atmosphere above us, just what have we lost sight of? The ground earth we live in or the earth as a totality? This is before we add in 8,000 miles of rock below us and the same level of atmosphere as above us.
I do read your posts and Bill Illis’s too as you are both posters of science, discussion, counterpoint and opinions worth digesting. Or as an outsider might say; you both convey information that help resolve my owninternal thoughts and arguments about CAGW issues.
John: Thanks for listening (reading) 🙂
The Marinoan glaciation is at the very limit and a bit beyond of our ability to reconstruct the position of the continents by apparent polar wander. Beyond about 500mya the wander paths get very wanky to the extent one must consider true polar wander. Scotese’s reconstruction is by no means consensus.
I’m sticking with the uniformitarian approach that since we are nearly certain none of the Phanerozoic glaciations were any more than snowcone earths, why should the Marinoan, a mere 150 million years older than the Ordovician, be different?
Life is simple.
Write a grant empowering Carbon dioxide,
Get funded,
Get published,
Life is simple.
Why does his paper set off my BS meter at the paragraph that starts “Normally…”
Dan the Geologist says:
March 1, 2013 at 1:06 pm
it’s true – there are too many odd observations – but that just ‘allows’ the speculative widening of fairly sensible hypotheses into drug crazed WAGs!
Speaking as one geologist to another – we can often infer certain things occurred, and we can presume and speculate some reasons for such occurences – but, ( geologically speaking ) that is all we can do………we have no choice but to base our geological and palaeo inferences on current observations and ideas, for example. But in truth, we have little proof or high degree confidence or confirmation for many of our presumptions?
To my mind – geological interpretation is less reliable than tree ring interpretation! e,g .you have some tree rings, but you cannot say whether the growth variations were temp/co2/rainfall/nutrient caused, or a mix of all of them in alternating patterns, etc! Now take a few hundred metres of rock cross section and subsequent detailed paleao analysis and tell me that its any more accurate!? Geological generalisations are ok in my book, they do usually make sense – but further detailed ‘deduction’, sprinkled with a liberal dose of ‘I’m looking for this’ is not the way to promote Earth Sciences IMHO.
Desperation sets in so bubbles have to be contemporary:
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/past-antarctic-warming-linked-greenhouse-gas-195641461.html
“It’s new evidence from the past of the strong role of CO2 [carbon dioxide] in climate variation,” said study co-author Frédéric Parrenin, a climate scientist at the CNRS in France.”
“But gas bubbles from a given period get buried deeper than ice of the same period, making it hard to tie past temperatures with atmospheric changes.
In the past, scientists using older techniques found that increases in carbon dioxide happened after global warming, not the reverse”
“They focused on ice from 20,000 to 10,000 years ago, which encompassed the last period when the planet warmed naturally and glaciers melted.
The team measured the concentration of nitrogen-15 isotopes, or atoms of the same element with different weights, at different depths throughout the ice cores. They compared the depth of that isotope with the ice composition for all the cores to determine the distance between ice bubbles and ice from the same period.
Global warming
The team found that global warming and a carbon dioxide increase happened at virtually the same time — between 18,000 and 11,000 years ago.
“It makes it possible that CO2 was the cause — at least partly — of the temperature increase during the courses of the last glaciation,” Parrenin told LiveScience.”
==
At least partly… wonderful.
The paper is here: https://sites.google.com/site/fredericparreninpro/publications
The conclusion is:
“Although the timings of the Bølling,YoungerDryas,
and Holocene onsets as visible in the methane
records are now well constrained by a layercounted
Greenland chronology (27), determining
the timing of the onset of TI in Antarctic records
remains challenging. Modeling studies using coupled
carbon cycle–climate models will be needed
to fully explore the implications of this synchronous
change of AT and aCO2 during TI in order
to improve our understanding of natural climate
change mechanisms”.
So basically they will use models that already infer carbon climate coupling in order to demonstrate carbon climate coupling…
If “water and air were cut off by a thick layer of ice during Snowball Earth, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could have increased drastically”.
How then could the atmospheric composition affect the depositions of Barium sulphate?
It seems that carbon dioxide is the usual suspect in studies of global warming. As water vapor the primary radiative coolant of the troposphere, (cf. Robert Clemenzi, The Greenhouse Effect) I wonder if global water vapor depletion might have been a factor also?
Plausible, but a far cry from being even a hypothesis. Firstly, oxygen isotopes can be altered by any number of things as the authors have themselves acknowledged. So this line or reasoning leads to the prosecutors fallacy.
Secondly, I would like to offer a falsification test. If the infra red radiation emitted from snow/ice is analysed for peak wavelengths, do those peaks match the absorbtion spectra for CO2? If not, conjecture is falsified. If so, we are back to “plausible.”
Thirdly, an alternative hypothesis needs to be considered, such as plate tectonics and vulcanism. Did vulcanism lead to more black carbon deposits? What would be the effect on albedo? Another hypothesis are orbital variations. What do we know about changes in eccentricity or obliquity? Can we even go back that far? What of asteroid impact? A 1/100 my event would be stretching coincidence a bit, but what sort of effect would a 1/1 my event have?
Many things to consider then, before we can say “it was co2 what dunnit.!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC123197/
“These findings of a 17O anomaly being generated from a solid, and solely by thermal means, provide a further challenge to current understanding of the nature of mass-independent isotopic fractionation.”
@Ed Zuiderwijk
If “water and air were cut off by a thick layer of ice during Snowball Earth, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could have increased drastically”.
How then could the atmospheric composition affect the depositions of Barium sulphate?
I have toyed with another problem of a Snowball Earth.
Photosynthetic life continues, at least at the Equator. Proof: it didn’t go extinct.
So Oxygen is continued to be generated and it is consumed by life that survives. The working assumption is that O2 concentrations in the atmosphere are low. Why? Oxygen is a very reactive substance. But what consumes oxygen in a PreCambrian atmosphere above a near global ice cap?
It has been proposed that a 35% oxygen atmosphere is the maximum possible on Earth because above that concentration forest fires become rampant. Combustion is spontaneous. In the PreCambrian, however, the land is barren with or without ice and snow. There is nothing to burn all life is below the surface of the water or in the tidal zone. What then keeps O2 concentrations in check?
If there is a Snowball Earth, could it be caused by a decline in CO2 and rise in O2 in the atmosphere? If so, could a rich O2 atmosphere then crash by “burning” anoxic sediments built up slowly over millions of years and evolution of burrowing life? Could a crash of O2 and rise of CO2 by burning Cambrian sediment “fossil fuel” end the Snowball?
I admit it is pure speculation. But when dealing with the era of the Cambrian Explosion, we have to remember “We are not in Kansas, anymore.” The dry land is barren. The atmosphere might or might not be thick. The sun was probably dimmer. Big Asteroid Impacts are probably more frequent than today. Axis tilt more than today? The Earth is a pretty alian planet.
Comment from Atheok….. “And the whole volcano thing erupting huge amounts of CO2? Just where did the CO2 come from? Nowadays it is believed (that faith word again) that subducted calcium carbonates (fossil critter skeletons) are the primary source of the CO2 when the mineral CaCO2 is decomposed under heat and pressure. I guess they’ll have to invent scenarios to stoke the volcanos with CO2 in frozen gaia land as copious cubic miles of subducted calcium carbonates might be unlikely 670 MYA”.
No need to invent any scenarios as there is plenty of carbonate available pre-670Ma. A little in the early and mid Archean [pre 2500Ma] and plenty in the late Archean and Proterozoic [ see http://sp.sepmonline.org/content/sepspcot/1/SEC6.abstract%5D.
The Carawine Dolomite of Western Australia has been dated to 2630Ma. I would think 2000Ma is enough time to subduct a bit of carbonate to provide a source of CO2 for snowball/slushball era volcanoes.
So where the hell did all that water vanish to ?
If all of the planet land sea and air is covered by ice, or even feshly fallen snow, where did all that water come from, in order to cover everything, and more importantly, where did it all go to ? Was all of earth’s land in Antarctica, or what ?
Hardly seems possible to me, that you can have thousands of feet of ice all over the planet, with the amount of water we have and the altitudes of some of the land.
“””””…..Vince Causey says:
March 2, 2013 at 11:33 am
Plausible, but a far cry from being even a hypothesis. Firstly, oxygen isotopes can be altered by any number of things as the authors have themselves acknowledged. So this line or reasoning leads to the prosecutors fallacy.
Secondly, I would like to offer a falsification test. If the infra red radiation emitted from snow/ice is analysed for peak wavelengths, do those peaks match the absorbtion spectra for CO2? If not, conjecture is falsified. If so, we are back to “plausible.”…..”””””
Vince Earth’s current purported average surface Temperature is 288 K and the peak of the LWIR emitted spectrum is about 10.1 microns. If the peak got shifted to 15 microns, where peak CO2 absorption is, then the average Temperature would have to be around 193 K, or -80 C, so about like Vostok station in Winter midnight.
So how are you going to get the whole earth bathed more than 50% in sunlight to be as cold as Vostok in the complete absence of solar energy, and at such a high altitude compared to most of the surface (which is at sea level) ?