enveloping glaciations during the Neoproterozoic Eon, that notion of “Snowball” conditions has received many severe knocks, charted by numerous items in EPN.  Geochemists and geologists from the Universities of Vienna and Witwatersrand realised that a good test of the hypothesis would be to concentrate on a rather obvious property of an ice-bound planet (Bodiselitsch, B. et al. 2005.  Estimating duration and intensity of Neoproterozoic Snowball glaciations from Ir anomalies.  Science, v. 308. P. 239-242).  Whatever falls on an ice sheet, whether it is cosmic dust from outside the Earth or ash from volcanoes, becomes trapped in the annual layers of ice.  When the ice melts, that accumulated content is transferred to the oceans very quickly.  With weathering in suspended animation during the glacial epoch, transport of many elements would have slowed to very low levels.  So, marine sediments deposited immediately after the diamictites that are allegedly glaciogenic ought to contain anomalously high levels of several elements.  The most important of these would be those which show very different abundance patterns in meteorites form those in terrestrial rocks.

Bodiselitsch et al. hit what seems to be “paydirt” in carbonates above a prominent diamictite in central Africa.  Their samples are impeccable, being from diamond-drill cores produced during evaluation of sediment-hosted mineralization in the famous Neoproterozoic Copper Belt of Zambia and Congo.  The core contains a prominent iridium anomaly at the very base of the carbonates, with a “signature” relative to other anomalous elements that points to a cosmic origin.  Normally such an anomaly would be ascribed to a meteorite impact, but in this case the coincidence would be too good to be true.  Instead, the authors use the magnitude of the anomaly to estimate how long cosmic dust had to accumulate to build up such a high level if it was released by rapid deglaciation.  Deep-ocean sediments from the last 80 Ma are a guide to the long-term accumulation rate of cosmic material.  If that rate is applied to the cap-carbonate anomaly, it gives a total time for accumulation in the hypothesised global ice cover of around 12 Ma.  Presumably this would have been from ice immediately overlying the area being studied.  An ice age that long defies any idea of more “normal”, astronomically forced glaciation, which would be expected to have cyclically formed and receded many times, thereby releasing the dust particles much more gradually.  Any anomalies would be expected in the diamictites themselves, yet there are none.  Although sample spacing is rather patchy through the entire succession, they are most dense around the anomaly itself.  Moreover, another suspected glaciogenic “package” higher in the sequence shows exactly the same iridium “spike”. 

Arguing against such support for the “Snowball Earth” hypothesis will be difficult, but other sequences require similar tests, most importantly those of Namibia, where Hoffman and colleagues developed their ideas, and the much more extensive deposits of Australia.  This diamictite sequence is reckoned to represent both postulated deep-freeze events of the Neoproterozoic, around 710 Ma (Sturtian) and 635 Ma (Marinoan). There is one nagging problem.  Data from one area are likely to record ice-retained cosmic dust only from ice in its immediate vicinity, and therefore do not represent the entire planet.  Much of the controversy is between supporters of a whole-Earth ice cover, and those who favour patchy glaciation (the “Slushball” model).  Unfortunately, Neoproterozoic stratigraphic correlation and radiometric age calibration is not sufficiently good to detect the same intervals elsewhere and look for anomalies there.  In fact, the stratigraphy is generally correlated from place to place by matching the diamictites themselves.  There is plenty of evidence that they may all coincide in time.

Tracking ocean circulation during the last glacial period

The use of various ocean-floor sediment proxies for climate change, such as the ups and downs of heavy ¹⁸O that chart waxing and waning continental ice cover, has progressively revealed the complexity of shifts during glacial and interglacial periods. Yet more emerged from finer-resolution time-series contained with Greenland and Antarctic ice cores.  The diversity of information that proxy for many different, climate-related processes has in the last decade enabled palaeoclimatologists to begin piecing together possible causative mechanisms, beyond the initial discovery of an astronomical signal in early oxygen-isotope records.  One of enormous significance is the possibility that sudden millennial-scale cooling and warming link to changes in ocean circulation, especially that performed by the Gulf Stream driven by thermohaline processes at high northern latitudes.  Shutting down that poleward transfer of heat, probably because freshwater made high-latitude surface water less dense, has been implicated in sudden cooling or “stadials”, and its restart linked to warming or “or interstadials”.  The last such sudden climate event, the Younger Dryas between about 12 and 11 thousand years ago, is widely believed to have resulted from a collapse of the Gulf Stream.  That has raised fears that current anthropogenic warming might achieve the same thing, thereby plunging Western Europe into a counterintuitive frigid period through loss of its maritime warming.

Ocean circulation has lacked a proxy that might help resolve such worrying scenarios, but it seems that one has arrived, because of improvements in mass spectrometry (Piotrowski, A.M. et al. 2005.  Temporal relationships of carbon cycling and ocean circulation at glacial boundaries.  Science, v. 307, p. 1933-1938).  Different bodies of ocean-surface water have subtly different chemical compositions, due to the varied geochemistry of surrounding landmasses.  Weathering of exposed rocks results in some elements entering solution in river water, and that mixes with surface water in the nearby ocean.  Among the most useful elements are those with an isotope to which radioactive decay of unstable isotopes of another element contributes.  A good example is ⁸⁷Sr that is formed when ⁸⁷Rb decays.  Where continents expose  large expanses of very ancient rocks they contribute more ⁸⁷Sr to seawater than do continents veneered with younger rocks.  Strontium isotopes have been used successfully for charting very-long term changes in the overall erosion of continental crust, in relation to climate shifts, but being related to calcium are taken up quickly by carbonate secreting organisms, such as foraminifera, at many different levels in the ocean as it circulates.  So they are not very useful for short-term studies.  A more useful isotopic system involving an daughter of slow radioactive decay is that of neodymium, because it does not get taken up in this way.  It does however enter the manganese minerals that slowly precipitate on the deep ocean floor.  Moreover, its isotopic composition varies greatly in different ocean-water masses.  Piotrowski et al. used neodymium isotopes from deep ocean cores to see if changes in this circulation proxy coincided with known climate proxies.  For interstadial, warming events there is a match, so a Gulf-stream control over millennial-scale climate shifts is indeed supported.  But for the start and end of the full glacial period control by ocean circulation did not happen.  Instead, changes in the neodymium record lag behind the climate proxies, suggesting climatic control of circulation, which then “kicked in” to boost changes that were well underway.

See also: Kerr, R.A. 2005.  Ocean flow amplified, not triggered, climate change.  Science, v. 307, p. 1854.