MIT: 'Snowball Earth' Came From Huge Drop in Sunlight - ExtremeTech

Scientists believe Earth experienced several of these periods when the entire surface was covered by ice and snow.

A Snowball Earth is on a completely different level, and that’s made it difficult to identify causes.

The findings suggest that all you need for a Snowball Earth is a sufficiently large drop in solar radiation reaching the planet’s surface.

Interestingly, the modeling done by graduate student Constantin Arnscheidt and geophysics professor Daniel Rothman show that solar radiation doesn’t have to drop to any particular threshold to trigger a Snowball Earth.

That’s how you get to a Snowball scenario, but luckily for us, these periods are temporary.

The two suspected snowball Earth periods most likely happened around 700 million years ago, which is a notable time in the planet’s history.