Boston, Mass. Glacial deposits that formed on tropical land areas during snowball Earth episodes around 600 million years ago, lead to questions about how the glaciers that left the deposits were created. Now, Penn State geoscientists believe that these glaciers could only have formed after the Earth's oceans were entirely covered by thick sea ice.
"There is strong geologic evidence of tropical glaciation at sea level during those times," Dr. David Pollard, research associate, Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences' Environmental Institute, told attendees at the spring meeting of the American Geophysical Union today (May 29) in Boston. "We wanted to determine how low-level tropical glaciers could have formed."
Ice can accumulate in the tropics only if temperatures are below freezing or around freezing with large amounts of snowfall. Tropical glaciers exist today only on high mountain peaks such as the Andes and Mt. Kilimanjaro, and do not reach anywhere near sea level. Pollard and James K. Kasting, professor of geosciences, first looked at the possibility that tropical ice sheets formed before the oceans completely froze into a snowball Earth, when equatorial oceans were still ice-free and could supply enough moisture for substantial snowfall.
During the lead-up to a snowball Earth episode, the Earth gradually cools because the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere decreases. Relatively fast weathering of silicate rocks on large tropical landmasses causes this decrease that locks up carbon. As the earth cools, the oceans begin freezing. The high reflectivity of the snow and ice that covers the northern and southern oceans, reflects, rather than absorbs, the sun's heat and further cools the planet. This cooling takes place slowly until the oceans are frozen to about 30 degrees latitude, or from the North Pole down to New Orleans, La. and from the South Pole up to the tip of South Africa.
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Contact: A'ndrea Elyse Messer
aem1@psu.edu
814-865-9481
Penn State
31-May-2001