Posted on 02/21/2024 8:53:36 PM PST by Red Badger
Image Credit : Oleg Kuznetsov - CC BY-SA 4.0
Geologists have solved the source of Snowball Earth, a period when the planet’s environment was an extreme “icehouse”.
A new study by the University of Sydney has applied plate tectonic modelling to understand the cause of the ice-age climate.
According to the geologists, the event was the result of low volcanic emissions that occurred more than 700 mya, providing new insights into how sensitive global climate is to atmospheric carbon concentration.
“Imagine the Earth almost completely frozen over,” said the study’s lead author, ARC Future Fellow Dr Adriana Dutkiewicz. “That’s just what happened about 700 million years ago; the planet was blanketed in ice from poles to equator and temperatures plunged. However, just what caused this has been an open question.”
“We now think we have cracked the mystery: historically low volcanic carbon dioxide emissions, aided by weathering of a large pile of volcanic rocks in what is now Canada; a process that absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide,” added Dr Dutkiewicz.
The study analysed plate tectonic models that demonstrated the evolution of continents and ocean basins at a time after the breakup of the ancient supercontinent Rodina.
Using a computer model, the researchers were able to calculate the CO2 degassing of submarine volcanoes along mid-ocean ridges, revealing that the start of the Sturtian ice age precisely correlates with an all-time low in volcanic CO2 emissions. In addition, the CO2 outflux remained relatively low for the entire duration of the ice age.
Dr Dutkiewicz said: “At this time, there were no multicellular animals or land plants on Earth. The greenhouse gas concentration of the atmosphere was almost entirely dictated by CO2 outgassing from volcanoes and by silicate rock weathering processes, which consume CO2.”
As a consequence, atmospheric CO2 declined to a threshold triggering glaciation, estimated to be below 200 parts per million, less than half of today’s level.
Header Image Credit : Oleg Kuznetsov – CC BY-SA 4.0
Quick! Tax every country with a volcano to stop this insidious global warming!
Evil CO2 Keeps us from freezing to death Ping!..............
Global warming was started by the Flintstones’ SUV.
So, without CO2, the earth will be uninhabitable.
Ever since they introduced "ice core CO2 data" I knew the scientific method would collapse in my lifetime.
Who'da thunk it?
*Let’s start decomposing silicate rock in massive scale to cool off the planet!
Computer model tuned and adjusted to produce a predetermined result?
Are you sure Fred’s SUV actually had an engine? 😆😝
That’s pretty interesting, because if we were not adding to atmospheric CO2, where would we be? Chicago under a mile of ice — again?
And then another question is, what brought Earth back out of being a snowball? Somehow I don’t think it was 5 billion guys on snowmobiles.
The rest of the Snowball Earth keyword, sorted:
Carbon dioxide is best in a range similar to what was around in our atmosphere about 50-100 years ago. Too little and it can get too cold, too much and it can overheat.
Even so, I think the cause and effect relationships are not as straightforward as climate science nowadays claims, a warmer earth will also produce more carbon dioxide from the increasing areas covered by vegetation.
I would rather take my chances with a bit of extra warmth than in the other direction, cold climates are more of a potential danger than warm ones.
During that snowball earth episode, a lot of the world’s land was near the equator. You would think that could be a good thing for a fairly high average global temperature but the Sun was not putting out as much heat then as it does today, and once the balance tilted towards glaciation of higher portions of the land, it quickly went out of control and froze over the whole planet. I’ve read that the earth could have stayed in that state for a long time but volcanic activity increased greenhouse gases and once the ice began to recede, by then solar output had increased a bit and these global glaciation conditions never returned. The ice ages we have now are started by a different process, glaciers near the poles expanding towards lower latitudes. Those see to be controlled by the various orbital factors which are currently in a neutral but inter-glacial setting. If we weren’t warming up the atmosphere slightly, it would be cooling very slowly but not at a rate to concern us about an ice age, that could be 25 to 50k years into our future.
Conclusions and Recommendations?
MORE, much more ‘study’ is needed as well as a perpetual funding mechanism to finance it.
This article says that anything below 200 PPM co2 results in all multicellular life being destroyed. Snow ball earth was low CO2. Obviously, we are up around 380PPM now, but the climate people say that it’s way up from the 270 pre-industrial era. So, they want co2 lower (I hope they aren’t shooting for less than 200).
This article gives the last 800k years of data via glacial ice cores. You might notice that over the course of modern humanity 12-15k years, we have been very close to the bottom 200ppm co2, or almost wiped out from another snowball earth.
If I were looking for a stable environment, with less risk to all multicellular organisms, I would think about 420-480 ppm would be the goal.
Just remember that environmentalists are mostly idiots...................
Well, it did run on gas.
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