Related papers: Archean Paleo-climate: The first snowball?
The case for a much warmer climate on the early Earth than now is presented. The oxygen isotope record in sedimentary chert and the compelling case for a near constant isotopic oxygen composition of seawater over geologic time support…
Oxygen isotopes in marine cherts have been used to infer hot oceans during the Archean with temperatures between 60{\deg}C (333 K) and 80{\deg}C (353 K). Such climates are challenging for the early Earth warmed by the faint young Sun. The…
Earth's earliest sedimentary record contains evidence that surface temperatures were similar to, or perhaps even warmer than modern. In contrast, standard Solar models suggest the Sun was 25% less luminous at this ancient epoch, implying a…
The early Earth's environment is controversial. Climatic estimates range from hot to glacial, and inferred marine pH spans strongly alkaline to acidic. Better understanding of early climate and ocean chemistry would improve our knowledge of…
Despite a fainter Sun, the surface of the early Earth was mostly ice-free. Proposed solutions to this so-called "faint young Sun problem" have usually involved higher amounts of greenhouse gases than present in the modern-day atmosphere.…
For more than four decades, scientists have been trying to find an answer to one of the most fundamental questions in paleoclimatology, the `faint young Sun problem'. For the early Earth, models of stellar evolution predict a solar energy…
The instability with respect to global glaciation is a fundamental property of the climate system caused by the positive ice-albedo feedback. The atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at which this Snowball bifurcation occurs changes…
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…
The Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis considers that greenhouse gas concentrations should have declined during the Holocene in absence of humankind activity, leading to glacial inception around the present. It partly relies on the fact that…
It has been hypothesized that the Earth may have experienced snowball events in the past, during which its surface became completely covered with ice. Previous studies used general circulation models to investigate the onset and climate of…
Using an intermediate complexity climate model (Planet Simulator), we investigate the so-called Snowball Earth transition. For certain values of the solar constant, the climate system allows two different stable states: one of them is the…
Standard accretion disk models suggest that the snow line in the solar nebula migrated interior to the Earth's orbit in a late stage of nebula evolution. In this late stage, a significant amount of ice could have been delivered to 1 AU from…
Several clues indicate that Titan's atmosphere has been depleted in methane during some period of its history, possibly as recently as 0.5-1 billion years ago. It could also happen in the future. Under these conditions, the atmosphere…
Habitable planets are commonly imagined to be temperate planets like Earth, with areas of open ocean and warm land. In contrast, planets in snowball states, where oceans are entirely ice-covered, are believed to be inhospitable. However, we…
In light of the rapid recent retreat of Arctic sea ice, a number of studies have discussed the possibility of a critical threshold (or "tipping point") beyond which the ice-albedo feedback causes the ice cover to melt away in an…
Understanding when global glaciations occur on Earth-like planets is a major challenge in climate evolution research. Most models of how greenhouse gases like CO2 evolve with time on terrestrial planets are deterministic, but the complex,…
In the aftermath of the Moon-forming giant impact, the Hadean Earth's mantle and surface crystallized from a global magma ocean blanketed by a dense volatile-rich atmosphere. While prior studies have explored the thermal evolution of such…
Paleoclimate data help us assess climate sensitivity and potential human-made climate effects. We conclude that Earth in the warmest interglacial periods of the past million years was less than 1{\deg}C warmer than in the Holocene. Polar…
Tidally locked terrestrial planets around low-mass stars are the prime targets for future atmospheric characterizations of potentially habitable systems, especially the three nearby ones--Proxima b, TRAPPIST-1e, and LHS 1140b. Previous…
In Arctic East Siberia many remains of mammoths have been found. In this region there is not sufficient sunlight over the year to allow for the growth of the plants on which these animals feed. Consequently the latitude of these regions…