[VadeRetro]

Gee, this is a badly written article. It doesn't explain well at all how gamma ray bursts cause ice ages, nor does it explain what extinction it is talking about. The date 440 million years ago is not one of the "biggies" normally discussed. Those would be the Permian-Triassic 250 million years ago and the Cretaceous-Tertiary 65 million years ago. Then there was the "Snowball Earth" episode about 700 million years ago. But this is none of those. It apparently refers to the time we started losing a lot of trilobite species.

Not saying it's wrong, just a rather scattershot presentation.

[John H K]

Hmmm, I thought they meant "Snowball Earth" but as you point out the dates are wrong.

What's really bad about the article is the average person thinks of the "Ice Age" as the very recent episodes we've had in the last few million years, and the article doesn't point out that it's not the same Ice Age most people are thinking of when they read the headline.

Much of the contempt that people have for science on FR is actually just caused by moron non-science writers getting it totally wrong for a general audience, not the scientists themselves.

[EUPHORIC]

Gee, this is a badly written article.

Actually you are just not a comprehensive reader.

Article FULLY explains how this could cause an ice age.

Straight up.