PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Groundbreaking study provides new evidence of when Earth was slushy

The planet underwent a massive, rapid melting period after the last global ice age, the new study suggests.

2024-11-05
(Press-News.org) At the end of the last global ice age, the deep-frozen Earth reached a built-in limit of climate change and thawed into a slushy planet.

Results from a Virginia Tech-led study provide the first direct geochemical evidence of the slushy planet — otherwise known as the “plumeworld ocean” era — when sky-high carbon dioxide levels forced the frozen Earth into a massive, rapid melting period.

“Our results have important implications for understanding how Earth's climate and ocean chemistry changed after the extreme conditions of the last global ice age,” said lead author Tian Gan, a former Virginia Tech postdoctoral researcher. Gan worked with geologist Shuhai Xiao on the study, which was released Nov. 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

Deep-frozen Earth The last global ice age took place about 635 million to 650 million years ago, when scientists believe global temperatures dropped and the polar ice caps began to creep around the hemispheres. The growing ice reflected more sunlight away from the Earth, setting off a spiral of plunging temperatures.

“A quarter of the ocean was frozen due to extremely low carbon-dioxide levels,” said Xiao, who recently was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.

When the surface ocean sealed, a chain of reactions stuttered to a stop:

The water cycle locked up. No evaporation and very little rain or snow.  Without water, there was a massive slowdown in a carbon-dioxide consuming process called chemical weathering, where rocks erode and disintegrate. Without weathering and erosion, carbon dioxide began to amass in the atmosphere and trap heat. “It was just a matter of time until the carbon-dioxide levels were high enough to break the pattern of ice,” Xiao said. “When it ended, it probably ended catastrophically.”

Plume world Suddenly, heat started to build. The ice caps began to recede, and Earth’s climate backpedaled furiously toward the drippy and soupy. Over a mere 10 million years, average global temperatures swung from minus 50 to 120 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 45 to 48 degrees Celsius).

But the ice didn’t melt and remix with seawater at the same time. The research findings paint a very different world than what we can imagine: vast rivers of glacial water rushing like a reverse tsunami from the land into the sea, then pooling on top of extra salty, extra dense ocean water. 

The researchers tested this version of the prehistoric world by looking at a set of carbonate rocks that formed as the global ice age was ending.

They analyzed a certain geochemical signature, the relative abundance of lithium isotopes, recorded within the carbonate rocks. According to plumeworld ocean theory, the geochemical signatures of freshwater would be stronger in rocks formed under nearshore meltwater than in the rocks formed offshore, beneath the deep, salty sea — and that’s exactly what the researchers observed.

The findings bring the limit of environmental change into better focus, said Xiao, but they also give researchers additional insight into the frontiers of biology and the resiliency of life under extreme conditions — hot, cold, and slushy.

Study collaborators include:

Ben Gill, Virginia Tech associate professor of sedimentary geochemistry Morrison Nolan, former graduate student, now at Denison University Collaborators from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, University of Maryland at College Park, University of Munich in Germany, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of Nevada at Las Vegas  END


ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

International survey of more than 1600 biomedical researchers on the perceived causes of irreproducibility of research results

International survey of more than 1600 biomedical researchers on the perceived causes of irreproducibility of research results
2024-11-05
International survey of more than 1600 biomedical researchers on the perceived causes of irreproducibility of research results   ##### In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology:   http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002870 Article Title: Biomedical researchers’ perspectives on the reproducibility of research Author Countries: Canada, Australia, United States Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...

Integrating data from different experimental approaches into one model is challenging – this study presents a community-based, full-scale in silico model of the rat hippocampal CA1 region that integra

Integrating data from different experimental approaches into one model is challenging – this study presents a community-based, full-scale in silico model of the rat hippocampal CA1 region that integra
2024-11-05
Integrating data from different experimental approaches into one model is challenging – this study presents a community-based, full-scale in silico model of the rat hippocampal CA1 region that integrates diverse experimental data from synapse to network ##### In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology:   http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3002861 Article Title: Community-based reconstruction ...

SwRI awarded grant to characterize Las Moras Springs watershed

SwRI awarded grant to characterize Las Moras Springs watershed
2024-11-05
SAN ANTONIO — November 5, 2024 — Hydrologists at Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) will begin a 12-month targeted water-sampling campaign of the Las Moras Springs system near Brackettville, Texas. The project will analyze and characterize the system of springs and their relationship to the Pinto Creek watershed to improve water management and conservation efforts. “Las Moras, like many other Texas spring systems, are at-risk and prone to going dry. It is important to clear up uncertainties about their source and relationship with ...

Water overuse in MATOPIBA could mean failure to meet up to 40% of local demand for crop irrigation

2024-11-05
Considered one of the fastest-growing agricultural frontiers in Brazil, and the area with the highest greenhouse gas emissions in the Cerrado, Brazil’s savanna-type biome, the region known as MATOPIBA risks facing water shortages in the years ahead. Water overuse may mean that between 30% and 40% of demand for crop irrigation cannot be met in the period 2025-40. MATOPIBA is a portmanteau of the names of four states – Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí, and Bahia (all but Tocantins located in Brazil’s Northeast ...

An extra year of education does not protect against brain aging

2024-11-05
Thanks to a 'natural experiment' involving 30,000 people, researchers at Radboud university medical center were able to determine very precisely what an extra year of education does to the brain in the long term. To their surprise, they found no effect on brain structure and no protective benefit of additional education against brain aging. It is well-known that education has many positive effects. People who spend more time in school are generally healthier, smarter, and have better jobs and higher incomes than those with less education. However, whether prolonged education actually causes changes in brain structure over the long term ...

Researchers from Uppsala and Magdeburg obtain an ERC Synergy Grant to advance cancer immunotherapy

Researchers from Uppsala and Magdeburg obtain an ERC Synergy Grant to advance cancer immunotherapy
2024-11-05
Targeting and customizing blood vessels in tumors to increase T cell infiltration and maintain their function may represent the next breakthrough in cancer therapy. The European Research Council has recognized this by awarding a prestigious Synergy Grant to the project VASC-IMMUNE, where three researchers, each possessing complementary expertise in this research topic, will synergize to advance the field. Professors Anna Dimberg and Magnus Essand are both from the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology, Uppsala University and Professor Thomas Tüting is from the Department of Dermatology, University Hospital Magdeburg. The successful implementation ...

Deaf male mosquitoes don’t mate

Deaf male mosquitoes don’t mate
2024-11-05
Mosquitoes are much more blunt. Mating occurs for a few seconds in midair. And all it takes to woo a male is the sound of a female’s wingbeats. Imagine researchers’ surprise when a single change completely killed the mosquitoes’ libidos.   Now a study out of UC Santa Barbara reveals that this is really all there is to it. Researchers in Professor Craig Montell’s lab created deaf mosquitoes and found that the males had absolutely no interest in mating. “You could leave them together with the females ...

Recognizing traumatic brain injury as a chronic condition fosters better care over the survivor’s lifetime

2024-11-05
INDIANAPOLIS – A commentary, published in the Journal of Neurotrauma, calls for traumatic brain injury to be recognized as a chronic condition as are diabetes, asthma, depression and heart failure. To provide comprehensive care for traumatic brain injury throughout individuals’ lifespans, the authors propose that coordinated care models they and others have developed, tested and applied to various populations -- including older adults, individuals living with depression and post-intensive care unit survivors -- be adapted to improve communication and integration between brain injury specialists -- including ...

SwRI’s Dr. James Walker receives Distinguished Scientist Award from Hypervelocity Impact Society

SwRI’s Dr. James Walker receives Distinguished Scientist Award from Hypervelocity Impact Society
2024-11-05
SAN ANTONIO — November 5, 2024 —Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. James Walker has received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Hypervelocity Impact Society. This honor recognizes individuals who have made a significant and lasting contribution to the field of hypervelocity science. Hypervelocity impact is typically viewed as impacts at speeds above 2 kilometers per second (4,475 miles per hour); for some materials, however, lower speed impacts display hypervelocity impact effects. The ...

A mother’s health problems pose a risk to her children

A mother’s health problems pose a risk to her children
2024-11-05
Women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and obesity are at a higher risk of giving birth to smaller babies in terms of birth weight, length, and head circumference, according to a recent study conducted at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). One in eight women is affected by the hormone disorder PCOS. Common characteristics are elevated levels of male sex hormones, infrequent or irregular menstrual periods, and the formation of small cysts on the ovaries. In the study, 390 children born to women ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Scientists find a region of the mouse gut tightly regulated by the immune system

How school eligibility influences the spread of infectious diseases: Insights for future outbreaks

UM School of Medicine researchers link snoring to behavioral problems in adolescents without declines in cognition

The Parasaurolophus’ pipes: Modeling the dinosaur’s crest to study its sound #ASA187

St. Jude appoints leading scientist to create groundbreaking Center of Excellence for Structural Cell Biology

Hear this! Transforming health care with speech-to-text technology #ASA187

Exploring the impact of offshore wind on whale deaths #ASA187

Mass General Brigham and BIDMC researchers unveil an AI protein engineer capable of making proteins ‘better, faster, stronger’

Metabolic and bariatric surgery safe and effective for patients with severe obesity

Smarter city planning: MSU researchers use brain activity to predict visits to urban areas

Using the world’s fastest exascale computer, ACM Gordon Bell Prize-winning team presents record-breaking algorithm to advance understanding of chemistry and biology

Jeffrey Hubbell joins NYU Tandon to lead new university-wide health engineering initiative & expand the school’s bioengineering focus

Fewer than 7% of global hotspots for whale-ship collisions have protection measures in place

Oldies but goodies: Study shows why elderly animals offer crucial scientific insights

Math-selective US universities reduce gender gap in STEM fields

Researchers identify previously unknown compound in drinking water

Chloronitramide anion – a newly characterized contaminant prevalent in chloramine treated tap water

Population connectivity shapes cultural complexity in chimpanzees

Direct hearing tests show that minke whales can hear high-frequency sounds

Whale-ship collision risk mapped across Earth’s oceans

Bye-bye microplastics: new plastic is recyclable and fully ocean-degradable

Unveiling nature of metal-support interaction: AI-driven breakthrough in catalysis

New imaging method enables detailed RNA analysis of the whole brain

Stability of perovskite solar cells doubled with protective coating

Chemists create world’s thinnest spaghetti

Empowering neuroscience: Large open brain models released

From traditional to technological: Advancements in fresco conservation

Design and imagination as essential tools during the climate crisis

Innovating archaeology: HKU scholars utilize immersive 3D tech to document and study the human past

What's the story, morning glory?

[Press-News.org] Groundbreaking study provides new evidence of when Earth was slushy
The planet underwent a massive, rapid melting period after the last global ice age, the new study suggests.