Survival of Life Through Frozen Periods
A tremendous glaciation would curtail plant life on Earth, thus letting the atmospheric oxygen be drastically depleted and perhaps even disappear, and thus allow non-oxidized iron-rich rocks to form.
Detractors argue that this kind of glaciation would have made life extinct entirely. However, microfossils such as stromatolites and oncolites prove that in shallow marine environments at least life did not suffer any perturbation. Instead life developed a trophic complexity and survived the cold period unscathed. Proponents counter that it may have been possible for life to survive in these ways:
- In reservoirs of anaerobic and low-oxygen life powered by chemicals in deep oceanic hydrothermal vents surviving in Earth's deep oceans and crust; but photosynthesis would not have been possible there.
- As eggs and dormant cells and spores deep-frozen into ice right through the most severe phases of the frozen period.
- Under the ice layer, in chemolithotrophic (mineral-metabolizing) ecosystems theoretically resembling those in existence in modern glacier beds, high-alpine and Arctic talus permafrost, and basal glacial ice. This is especially plausible in areas of volcanism or geothermal activity.
- In deep ocean regions far from the supercontinent Rodinia or its remnants as it broke apart and drifted on the tectonic plates, which may have allowed for some small regions of open water preserving small quantities of life with access to light and CO2 for photosynthesizers (not multicellular plants, which did not yet exist) to generate traces of oxygen that were enough to sustain some oxygen-dependent organisms. This would happen even if the sea froze over completely, if small parts of the ice were thin enough to admit light.
- In nunatak areas in the tropics, where daytime tropical sun or volcanic heat heated bare rock sheltered from cold wind and made small temporary melt pools, which would freeze at sunset.
- In pockets of liquid water within and under the ice caps, similar to Lake Vostok in Antarctica. In theory, this system may resemble microbial communities living in the perennially frozen lakes of the Antarctic dry valleys. Photosynthesis can occur under ice up to 100 m thick, and at the temperatures predicted by models equatorial sublimation would prevent equatorial ice thickness from exceeding 10 m.
- In small oases of liquid water, as would be found near geothermal hotspots resembling Iceland today.
However, organisms and ecosystems, as far as it can be determined by the fossil record, do not appear to have undergone the significant change that would be expected by a mass extinction. With the advent of more precise dating, a phytoplankton extinction event which had been associated with Snowball Earth was shown to precede glaciations by 16 million years. Even if life were to cling on in all the ecological refuges listed above, a whole-Earth glaciation would result in a biota with a noticeably different diversity and composition. This change in diversity and composition has not yet been observed– in fact, the organisms which should be most susceptible to climatic variation emerge unscathed from the Snowball Earth.
Read more about this topic: Snowball Earth
Famous quotes containing the words survival of, survival, life, frozen and/or periods:
“The principle of avoiding the unnecessary expenditure of energy has enabled the species to survive in a world full of stimuli; but it prevents the survival of the aristocracy.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)
“Personal change, growth, development, identity formation—these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events—a job, a mate, a child—through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail;
When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
Tu-whit, tu-whoo!—
A merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
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—Jerry Mander, U.S. advertising executive, author. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, ch. 15, Morrow (1978)