NEWS: Ocean Of Acid Blamed For Earth's 'Great Dying'
The first of the new papers was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the second in Science.
During the older episode, continental drift had brought most of the continents near the equator, where CO2, washed out of the atmosphere by rain, reacted chemically with exposed rock and was no longer available to trap heat from the Sun. The global cooling that resulted let sea ice expand until it reached well into what would are now the planet’s temperate zones. At that point, the dazzlingly white surface of the ice would have reflected enough sunlight back into space to accelerate the cooling — just the opposite of the so-called ice-albedo feedback in which diminishing Arctic ice coverage is speeding warming in the region.