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?
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.
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.
“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.
Perhaps on land. Not on the oceans.
Trilobite farts ended that.
And man made activity ended the glaciers, right? LOL
Thank Goodness for Globull Warming! /s
I wonder how much this “new study” cost, and who paid for it, when it’s already been known for decades and decades.
And given enough (geologic) time, will again! I mean, after we get through this warming phase, and the next Ice Age kicks into high gear...
Just visit one of the Mighty 5 national parks in Utah and they’ll demonstrate how the parks were formed by climate change, billions of years ago.