Liked on YouTube: Snowball Earth: When Our Planet Froze!

Snowball Earth: When Our Planet Froze!
Subscribe for more videos:https://www.youtube.com/c/InsaneCuriosity?sub_confirmation=1? Snowball Earth: The Planet Being Frozen Before it was Cool Long before Greta Thurnburg was even born, global warming has been a long standing concern of humanity, but that makes one wonder, has the Earth ever experienced a “global cooling” that has become a catastrophe? Let’s go on an adventure to know about that time when the Earth literally froze! (roll intro) The earth has certainly undergone a lot of changes ever since its birth: It has experienced a hit by an asteroid so strong that it created the Moon, it got barraged by a lot of meteors, comets and other planetesimals, and it has experienced the birth of life. But with all the heat that we experience nowadays, is it easy to imagine that once upon a time, the Earth once looked like a snowball? This hypothesis proposed by Joe Kirschvink: a paleomagnetist and biomagnetist from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, USA, is called snowball earth, which is exactly what it sounds like: our beloved home once looked like a ball covered in glistening white material, with water activity happening in the ocean beneath. Some scientists even predict that one of these events -- yes, it happened more than once -- even paved the way for the Cambrian emergence of life. This event dates really far back into history, with experts dating this to have happened around 700 to 600 million years ago. How do we know this? It’s easy to hypothesize something that happened a really long time ago, but how do we know this is possible? And most importantly, how did the Earth become the green, lively planet that we are living on today? Ever since the early 1900’s, geologists were finding traces of dropstones from all over the seven continents. These types of rocks are specifically carried out by the movement of glaciers, or glaciation. Specifically, as glaciers form, they have carried these rocks into the ocean. Once the glaciers reached a region where the temperature was higher, the ice sheets would melt, and these rocks would sink into the bottom of the sea. Eventually, these rocks became embedded on the sediments. These were what the scientists found everywhere, which suggests the possibility of glaciers being present not only at the poles, but practically, everywhere else...even in the equator that could get as warm as 31 degrees Celsius on average on a hot afternoon. Now, that doesn’t sound so hot, especially if you’re someone who lives in tropical countries, but surely, at this temperature, ice couldn’t have maintained its state or couldn’t have formed, could it? This phenomenon was so absurd that the initial thought of some scientists was that the Earth may have tilted sideways for the equator to explain how it froze during the snowball earth period. However, as time went on, scientists realized that it’s even more absurd to think that the planet went sideways as compared to the equator completely freezing. Another evidence found was the long gaps between the carbonite embedded in the sediments of rocks from the ocean floors, indicating a period of time where weathering, or the process of rain washing away rocks, have seemingly paused, and re-emerged. We’ll discuss more about how this could be a factor later in the video. Millions of years ago, the earth regularly accomplished this through the carbon cycle. First, erupting volcanoes emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. These greenhouse gases keep the planet warm, as they prevent heat from getting out. Eventually, these get washed up by the rain, and later form ions together with the rock particles that wash up to the ocean. These ions sink to the bottom of the ocean floor eventually forming what we call carbonite. If you would recall, we mentioned this earlier to be one of the evidence supporting the snowball earth hypothesis. This process kept the CO2 balance. As long as this process carried on, Earth was sure that its temperature would stay normal. Now, enter the pre-Pangaean supercontinent, Rodinia. Around this time, the star’s brightness was about 6% dimmer than what it currently is. A lower light intensity infers lower energy, and where there’s lower energy, there’s less heat. How did the ice melt? As the saying goes, there’s a rainbow after the rain, and there is a silver lining to every dark cloud. Luckily for the Earth, events like these have a way of correcting itself given a long time. What was Earth’s rainbow and silver lining? Well, let’s just say one of the main factors that caused the freezing underwent a massive character development to emerge as the hero of the story. Despite the abundance of the thick sheets of ice on the snowball earth, the breaking apart of the supercontinent, Rodinia, didn’t stop at all. Could life have survived during the Cryogenian era? #InsaneCuriosity#RecentSpaceDiscoveries
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