Posted on 11/19/2024 10:43:36 AM PST by Red Badger
PinGGG!.................
They used to teach this in sixth grade science class.
But then cars came along.....and there was an unstoppable warm up...the earth puked up hostile gases...and then...in the distance...a garden....with an apple tree, a fig tree and a hard wood tree...you know the rest....
Then the Flinstones got SUVs and warmed the planet.
Good thing the aliens showed up with their SUVs to warm things back up.
It was called Snowball Earth.
I have, yet another, dumb question. Doesn’t this mean there was more water back then?
Now it’s Pickleball Earth............
There are videos on youtube that talk about the age and development of the earth. One stated that the Earth was once an “ice planet” during one period and overrun with fungiform life in another. In a different video, a team used (LED?) lights on a dry lake bed to describe the age of the earth in a straight line. The lights stretched for about a mile. Human history (IIRC) could measured between two out-stretched arms at the end of the same line.
More ice, less water..................
I have heard a similar comparison, where the Empire State Building height represents the Earth’s timeline, and a postage stamp place atop the building represents the entirety of human history...............
Not necessarily... Same water... just frozen and piled up in places. The weight of the glaciers actually deformed the crust in some points so much that when the ice melted, the magma pushed the crust back up... This is how some rock at the tops of mountains was once sea bed...
Well, that and crustal boundary layers, obduction and subduction zones, etc...
I’m going to say no. It was just taken out of the loop in the form of ice. Sea levels were far lower at the time.
It has been a theory for 30 years, that now has some empirical support. Interesting.
Amazing what a few cow farts can do.
And big hairy elephants with long tuskusses would wander across the glaciers.
Exactly. You can today go to the top of mountain ranges in the American West and other places and find the marks of glaciers as they moved across the continent when these mountains were young pups.
“ice sheets that may have been several miles thick crept over every inch of Earth’s surface.”
How would that work? As the ice sheets grew larger and larger, there was less and less ocean surface for evaporation needed to create snowfall. When the ice sheets covered half of the ocean surface, evaporation would be reduced by half and snowstorms would be greatly diminished.
One would think that would be a self-limiting phenomenon, that you could not get to more than 50% or 75% of ice coverage of the oceans before there simply would not be enough snowfall to continue glacial growth.
But the glacial the ice sublimates (goes directly from solid to gas without passing through the liquid phase). So the water cycle could continue due to atmospheric water originating from sublimating glacial ice rather than evaporating ocean water.
In the case of glaciers, sublimation can occur when the air temperature is below freezing and the air is very dry (as the oceans got covered in ice, the air would become drier and drier). Under these conditions, ice at the surface of a glacier can turn directly into water vapor and be carried away by the wind. This process can occur even when the air temperature is below freezing because the heat required to sublimate the ice comes from the ice itself, which cools as it sublimates and can keep the surface below the air temperature.
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