1. Resilience of Snowball Earth to Stochastic Events
- Author
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Chaverot, Guillaume, Zorzi, Andrea, Ding, Xuesong, Itcovitz, Jonathan, Fan, Bowen, Bhatnagar, Siddharth, Ji, Aoshuang, Graham, Robert J., and Mittal, Tushar
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics ,Physics - Geophysics - Abstract
Earth went through at least two periods of global glaciation (i.e., ``Snowball Earth'' states) during the Neoproterozoic, the shortest of which (the Marinoan) may not have lasted sufficiently long for its termination to be explained by the gradual volcanic build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Large asteroid impacts and supervolcanic eruptions have been suggested as stochastic geological events that could cause a sudden end to global glaciation via a runaway melting process. Here, we employ an energy balance climate model to simulate the evolution of Snowball Earth's surface temperature after such events. We find that even a large impactor (diameters of $d \sim 100\,\mathrm{km}$) and the supervolcanic Toba eruption ($74\,\mathrm{kyr}$ ago), are insufficient to terminate a Snowball state unless background CO$_2$ has already been driven to high levels by long-term outgassing. We suggest, according to our modeling framework, that Earth's Snowball states would have been resilient to termination by stochastic events., Comment: Accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL)
- Published
- 2024