The article is from Januay 2000, so they were going wherever almost four years ago now. It deals extensively with the freezing and killing effects of the glaciation, of course.
These extreme glaciations occurred just before a rapid diversification of multicellular life, culminating in the so-called Cambrian explosion between 575 and 525 million years ago. Ironically, the long periods of isolation and extreme environments on a snowball earth would most likely have spurred on genetic change and could help account for this evolutionary burst.It also mentions an apparent extreme genetic bottleneck just before the otherwise unexpectedly late Cambrian blossoming of diversity.
Image: HEIDI NOLAND ALL ANIMALS descended from the first eukaryotes, cells with a membrane-bound nucleus, which appeared about two billion years ago. By the time of the first snowball earth episode more than one billion years later, eukaryotes had not developed beyond unicellular protozoa and filamentous algae. But despite the extreme climate, which may have "pruned" the eukaryote tree (dashed lines), all 11 animal phyla ever to inhabit the earth emerged within a narrow window of time in the aftermath of the last snowball event. The prolonged genetic isolation and selective pressure intrinsic to a snowball earth could be responsible for this explosion of new life-forms.