Massive eruptions 719 million years ago in what is now Canada may have sucked enough CO2 from the atmosphere to freeze Earth over 2 million years later.
Devastating volcanic eruptions may have been so enormous they turned the planet into"Snowball Earth" 717 million years ago, a study has found.
The massive eruptions, which occurred in what is now northern Canada, spewed cascades of lava that hardened into a volcanic highland covering 860,000 square miles — an area three times the size of Texas. Acidic rain then pelted these fresh rocks, producing a chemical reaction that may have enveloped the planet in ice for 57 million years.
"Nothing can be understood in isolation," Galen Pippa Halverson, a professor of geology at McGill University in Canada and co-author of the new study, told Science.There are two main ways that volcanic eruptions can cool the planet down, according to the study published 27 June in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Outbursts release gasses containing sulfur-rich particles that become suspended in the atmosphere and block sunlight, resulting in cooling.
To understand which mechanism triggered the Sturtian glaciation, the team needed to home in on exactly when the volcanic outburst took place. Sulfur particles stay suspended in the atmosphere for months to years, whereas rock weathering takes 1 million to 2 million years to spark a global cooling effect.
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