Resilience of Snowball Earth to Stochastic Events

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chaverot, Guillaume, Zorzi, Andrea, Ding, Xuesong, Itcovitz, Jonathan, Fan, Bowen, Bhatnagar, Siddharth, Ji, Aoshuang, Graham, Robert J., Mittal, Tushar
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Chaverot, Guillaume
Zorzi, Andrea
Ding, Xuesong
Itcovitz, Jonathan
Fan, Bowen
Bhatnagar, Siddharth
Ji, Aoshuang
Graham, Robert J.
Mittal, Tushar
author_facet Chaverot, Guillaume
Zorzi, Andrea
Ding, Xuesong
Itcovitz, Jonathan
Fan, Bowen
Bhatnagar, Siddharth
Ji, Aoshuang
Graham, Robert J.
Mittal, Tushar
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_10679
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Resilience of Snowball Earth to Stochastic Events
Chaverot, Guillaume
Zorzi, Andrea
Ding, Xuesong
Itcovitz, Jonathan
Fan, Bowen
Bhatnagar, Siddharth
Ji, Aoshuang
Graham, Robert J.
Mittal, Tushar
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Geophysics
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.
title Resilience of Snowball Earth to Stochastic Events
topic Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
Geophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.10679