Snowball Earth
I have no idea whether this theory known as “Snowball Earth” has any validity at all, but it’s fascinating to contemplate it:
The Snowball Earth hypothesis proposes that the Earth’s surface became entirely or nearly entirely frozen at least once, sometime earlier than 650 Mya (million years ago). Proponents of the hypothesis argue that it best explains sedimentary deposits generally regarded as of glacial origin at tropical paleolatitudes, and other otherwise enigmatic features in the geological record. Opponents of the hypothesis contest the implications of the geological evidence for global glaciation, the geophysical feasibility of an ice- or slush-covered ocean, and the difficulty of escaping an all-frozen condition. A number of unanswered questions exist…
Oh, I bet they do. I bet they do.
And here’s an entire website devoted to it.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Of course, with Snowball Earth, the completely-frozen state would not be the end of the world, because obviously it was reversible.
its valid…
below is about the last one, not the biggest one…
here is the part the AGW and others expect you NOT to know about… or much, or be able to talk about to othes who are ingorant and so, accept argument by authority (when authority is not being honest).
now, the thing they dont explain, but you can know from anytime you open a soda… the colder the soda, the more gas it can hold… the warmer it gets, the less it holds…
the AGW/Climate change “scientists” who faked numbers for political reasons, and have basically used data that does not exist (And admitted it to each other discussing it in the east anglia emails), have no explanation how we went from an ice age, where co2 was bound up, and humans barely existed and only in tropic climes which werent so tropic..
That the ice melted.. or how, in the prior age which had a lot higher CO2 levels without humans, and dragon flies the size of large birds, it got cold…
or, how this happened, before there were any large animals at all…
here is 5 million years of climate change from cores:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#/media/File:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg
notice how the temperature started a lot higher..
and now its a lot lower…
this is because you had the big bang… it was so hot, that atoms could not exist at all… not till it expanded and average energy per unit dropped… as it did, out of the condesates came the various particles and such and the great expansion… (Which makes it appear that things moved faster than light, but they didnt, except relative to each other)
this went on for a long long time, with most of the suns and things being very huge hydrogen and so on… until they would explode, and make heavier materials (atoms past iron on the periodic chart), galaxies like ours could not form.
eventually, ours did… and “lucky” us, everything became just right for life… like not being closer to the galactic center… but being way out there on a galatic limb… why? well, some of the things going on out there could sterilize the surface of the planet from millions of miles away… (and thats a short distance)
eventually, a glass cloud got cold enough that the matter condensed out of space, and eventually formed planets.. while they crow about mars, earths future is the same as venus…not mars. and way before the sun expands to sterlize everything.
the earth was formed about 4.5 billion years ago… it was a molten hot place… and about a quarter of a billion years after the hot blob was formed, it collided with another planet sized body and the moon was formed..
this was VERY VERY important, as it knocked the planet on the side and gave it a big spin… without which nothing would be alive and we would as a planet be like venus.. which doesnt spin
thanks to nuclear materials keeping the core molten, the tilt giving us seasons, the moon giving us tides and a big spin, we got a magnetic field which sheilds us from cosmic rays from the sun…
outside our atmosphere, the universe is a very very cold place… how cold? well turn on an old tv and see that white snow… THAT COLD… that snow is the remainder of the big bang energy heat which now has dropped to about 3 degrees above absolute zero…
and at absolute zero lots of wacky strange things can happen, like bose einstein condensates, and so on.. (the universe is made up of basically two kinds of particle types, fermions, and bosons… fermions have no mass and so act like waves and can exist in the same location… while bosons have mass and cant occupy the same place at the same time, except when the termperature drops so low that they kind of melt into each other…)
anyway… about 4 billion years ago, the first life appeared AFTER the earth cooled down enough… but it took a billion years before the first plants could do photosynthsis, and so, crack CO2 into its constituents of carbon and oxygen…
as it kept cooling, and the matter on the surface cooled and plate tectonics renewed the surface putting out new ores, and material, and subducting the old stuff.
then about 2.3 billion years ago, enough oxygen was seprated and all the surface matter that could be oxydized was, and the first snoball earth appeared.
but this wasnt because co2 was so low, this was because the molten earth had slowly cooled down and lost heat into space over a period of 2 billion years or more..
The first snoball earth and others were amazing periods of lifelessness… after all, it wasnt until about 2 billion years of life being tiny nothings, before another ice age about 700 million years came.. the second sno ball age. [this is the one they talk about, the first one is not known much given how the surface of the earth changed with techtonics being so fast most of the surface from then doesnt exist now – with the oldest rocks being in greenland… Isua Greenstone Belt about 3.6 billion years old.. and why greenland has some interesting rock.. like rubies and emeralds embedded in stone that used to be carundum… ) [yes my spelling stinks and memory fades]
which when it melted… then came the cambrian age.. this was the start of things that we are familiar with and was about 500 million years ago
about 380 million years ago came the first vertibrates… before that we were mostly worms, and plants… we are still worms, with bones inside that give us structure.. all animals are basically complicated worms.. (frank herbert got that… see DUNE series)
then it wasnt till about 65 to 250 million years ago the age of the dinosaurs happened.
it wouldnt be for 249 million years from then that tiny mouselike creatures, became hominids… to us, 2 million years ago. from then to now, is about 4% of the time that earth existed…
hominins the genus homo only existed in this 4% band of time.. primates appearing about 70 million years ago (but nothing like what you would expect)..
about half a million years ago the neanderthals existed… what we would somewhat recognize as modern humans (and appeared to the dwarven and orc like neanderthals, as elves in our fiction)
this time, we have only existed .004% of the time of the planets existence
it wasnt till after the last iceage that modern humans with societies and such started to get together and that was only 10,000 years ago or so…
if one was to take the bible seriously.. noah did not save all the animals, but saved all the domesticated animals who stopped us from being nomadic and gave us the fixed life we know now… we went from mostly meat eaters and scroungers… to grain and so on (And suffered for it).
modern hmans being here about .00002% of the time, give or take a decimal point
from this, came all the societies we know…
about 5000 years passed before we started being able to write… 3600 BCE.. in sumaria
about a 1000 years passed before we got literature
Enheduanna, daughter of Sargon of Akkad – the first person we know who wrote (shhhh dont tell the feminists, as all their ideas have no reality until society progressed to the point where they were so well off they could imagine what never existed in any long stretch)
about 3600 years ago, came the first letters
and all this so far in the last post ice age period
this writing concept exploded across the planet…
about 2800 came the first greek letters
2000 years ago, came the first histories of time before that was mostly verbaly handed down… in 2023 years ago, pliny the elder wrote what we can read today
we tend to think writing shows us thinking, but the writing of pliny shows we could think better than we do today, with less education, because it was key to survival… before we were domesticated by our rulers
The depth of darkness to which you can descend and still live is an exact measure of the height to which you can aspire to reach. Pliny the Elder
the birth of christ marks our calendar, but you cant teach that… because religion ruined the world.. eh?
but note. this period is only about 000004% of the time, and its ruined it all.
modern cities like rome, faded, the middle ages came and were due to weather and desease and science was born (from religion… how would you know the creator? by studying his works)
then came the unusual warm age and the year withotu a summer and on and on… till the 1900s..
then the people who would be sellng agw were keen on proving the earth will freeze.. (and they are right given that the universe is spreading out to a frozen thing with the average distance between atoms measured in inches)
then the 1970s came, and they thouguht we had to work fast to save the planet… from freezing.. but that condition suddenly changed direction, and so did the insect psychologist hanson…
of course the global warming timeline starts in the late 1800s, ignoring the cooling in the middle of the 1900s.
1956 – Ewing and Donn offer a feedback model for quick ice age onset.
1969 – Astronauts walk on the Moon, and people perceive the Earth as a fragile whole
using 1968 and the communist movement dominating the world population as the key moment…
thats 48 years ago
now… they claim they can tell you what will happen in the future from having only examined directly .0000001% of the total time of the planet earth
note that they have to erase that past 5 million year history that i link above to, to then descrbe the rising from the last downtrend from the last iceage that made modern humans…
which once it peaks will drop again and freeze the globe as the trends are 41k years and just over 100k years, and human kind as modern man with records and science of any kind including tools, being only around 10% of that period
if it wasnt our lives so short
and our vision so near sighted
they would be seen as ridiculous, self agrandizing, and manipulative as they are…
🙂
Neo set’s em up.
Dgr knocks them down.
What if a Kardashev 2 or 3 civilization (also known as god or entities) merely brought this planet to this solar system, after creating it from scratch?
Some science fiction kindle independent author should go with that premise, for once.
Even Japan has Rewrite.
Here’s a citation to a book that summarizes the development of the snowball earth theory:
Walker, G. (2003). Snowball Earth: The story of the great global catastrophe that spawned life as we know it. New York: Crown Publishers.
I read the book a couple of years ago. Fun and interesting, especially if you like reading about the history of science.
For what it’s worth, I’ve seen some outcrops that are indisputably Proterozoic glacial deposits. That’s not in question. I think there’s still some argument about the snowball theory, but I’m waaaaaay out of the loop on such things.
I have often wondered, though, how one really knows where the glacial deposits were deposited with respect to the Earth’s equator- 650 million years ago, the continents were in different locations. It isn’t proven to me, at least, that the deposits found in the tropics today were laid down in the tropics of then.
Yancey Ward Says:
“… 650 million years ago, the continents were in different locations …”
Yancey Ward:
Big, big questions. Thousands of people have written jillions of papers on this. To get started, try reading a book on elementary physical geology, and then something similar on historical geology.
If you’d like to try jumping into the deep end,
you could look at Christopher Scotese’s Paleomap Project (http://www.scotese.com/).
I assume that your comment was made in good faith. If not, then I can’t get into a religious discussion. Too far above my pay grade.
Cornflour:
Religion and geology, catastrophic vs gradual change in earth processes. The history of science and political agendas (global warming), funding of research, yes it gets above one’s pay grade pretty quickly. Good comment and recommendation to Yancy.