The snowball Earth hypothesis suggests that at some point approximately 715 million years ago our planet’s surface was totally – or as close as can be – covered in ice. Scientists had assumed that the glaciers covering the surface of the planet were stable, acting as a like for greenhouse gases that built up from
A new study from a team of French researchers from the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (CNRS/IPGP/Université Paris Diderot) working on conjunction with scientists from Brazil and the United States has challenged the belief that Earth was completely covered in ice 635 million years ago, creating what is now colloquially known as the Snowball Earth hypothesis.
A team of geoscientists working on a separate geological project in South Australia accidentally stumbled upon the oldest evidence of animal life yet found. Previously, the oldest fossil evidence of non-unicellular, “hard bodied” life forms dates to about 550 million years ago. This new discovery pushes back the clock on animal life by 80 to 90 million years.
