Snowball Earth Is a Death Trap

Evolutionists’ myth of a past
“Snowball Earth” that melted
has a dead-end problem

Evolutionary moyboys, flush with millions of years to spend from their reckless drafts on the bank of time, like to fill in the vast ages with mythical incidents. These include the geologic column with its five extinctions, the Great Oxygenation Event (GOE), the Younger Dryas, the Late Heavy Bombardment, the RNA World, Snowball Earth, and others. Once popularized by the scientific community, these unobserved incidents take on a life of their own, becoming reified topics of perpetual discussion.

It’s not that these incidents and periods are totally devoid of some empirical data that seem to support them; after all, we have evidence of glaciation that carved valleys as far south as Yosemite, and fossil graveyards show the extinction of many species. It’s that they are interpretations of data used by materialists to decorate the billions-of-years timeline that evolutionists need for their worldview. Once these zombie incidents become part of the corpse of knowledge (pun intended) that All Scientists Believe, few are the researchers willing to think outside the box and consider interpretations of the data that don’t require billions of years.

NASA cartoon of “Snowball Earth”

Today we examine one of the zombie fictions that evolutionists rely on called Snowball Earth. Before life got a foothold on our globe, they teach, the earth went through a period where most of the globe was covered with ice and snow, even down to the equator. They need this fiction to solve the Faint Young Sun Paradox. Current models of stellar evolution show that the sun had to be dimmer and cooler after it formed. Far be it from a “scientist” to believe that the sun was created by God for a planet he formed to be inhabited (Isaiah 45:18). No: it must have evolved! The earth “emerged” from a spinning dust cloud without mind, foresight, or purpose. That is science!

Problem: if the earth went through a Snowball period, it could never get out of it. Once an ice cover forms, it reflects sunlight back out into space. How much energy would be needed to melt enough ice to rescue the earth? That’s a calculation that can be made based on data from volcanoes and impacts and greenhouse gases. Can these alter the earth’s albedo (reflected brightness) enough to melt the ice? Or is the earth too “resilient” to change once it’s been frozen?

Resilience of Snowball Earth to Stochastic Events (Chaverot et al, Geophysical Research Letters, 19 July 2024). Geophysicists have assumed there are a couple of ways to melt a Snowball Earth: (1) volcanic activity, (2) increase of greenhouse gases, (3) impacts from asteroids. This team of nine geophysicists looked into these and found that none of them are adequate to get the earth green again.

Note: they speak of “long” and “short” periods of global glaciation, but it’s only the most recent short one that matters. If they cannot rescue God’s Green Earth from the most recent snowball, we wouldn’t be here to worry about it.

The terminations of Earth’s longest periods of global glaciation are commonly understood to have occurred due to the gradual build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from volcanism. However, the sudden ends of Earth’s shorter global glaciation periods likely cannot be explained by the same mechanisms. Large asteroid impacts and supervolcanic eruptions have been suggested as geophysical phenomena that could cause abrupt ends to global glaciation periods. Here, we model the evolution of the planet’s surface temperature in the aftermath of such events. Impacts and eruptions open up gaps in the global ice sheet, and also partially cover the ice in far-spreading dust and ash, both of which increase the amount of solar radiation that is absorbed by the planet comparing to the highly reflective surface of ice and snow. Greater absorption of radiation leads to higher surface temperatures, which increases ice melting, and generates a feedback loop that can melt the entire planet surface. However, we find that the scales of impact or eruption required to produce global melting are too great to have likely occurred at the times of Earth’s global glaciations.

These experts in geophysics, publishing in one of the world’s leading geology journals, don’t know how to rescue the earth from a snowball episode. Neither an impactor 100 km in diameter or the biggest known supervolcano could melt the ice.*

Snowball Earth, therefore, is like the old Roach Motel: planets check in, but they don’t check out.

In summary, they conclude, “Other mechanisms must, therefore, be explored to explain Earth’s short glaciation periods.”

So where is the answer to this conundrum about the unobserved past? It’s where all the other evolutionary problems are to be found: in futureware! 

Keep the funding coming. Zombie science must be resurrected! Scientists must believe in chance and billions of years. They dare not read Genesis for understanding anything about the history of the earth.

For earlier articles about the Snowball Earth hypothesis, see 9 Jan 2012 and 7 May 2018, or search on the keyword “snowball” in the search bar.

*Here are some of their details about why all known mechanisms to rescue the earth from a snowball stage don’t work:

In our modeling framework, surface albedo of the planet is the dominant driving force of long-term temperature change in the aftermath of stochastic events. For impacts, this takes the form of the ejecta curtain stemming from the impact site. For eruptions, volcanic ash is transported over a wide range of latitude and longitudes. We thus observe that eruptions produce a greater change in Earth’s surface albedo and hence a greater temperature response for typical scale events. However, even an impactor radius of 100 km is not sufficient to induce deglaciation of Snowball Earth. The warming at the impact site melts ice locally in the short-term, but due to a large radiative local imbalance, ice reforms in less than a year, returning the planet to the snowball state. Even if larger impactors could induce deglaciation, they are dynamically unlikely to have occurred on Earth at the time of its snowball episodes. Similarly, no recorded supervolcanic eruption could have single-handedly deglaciated Earth. The surface temperature increase due to dust deposition from the largest recorded event, Toba, does not reach the melting temperature of ice anywhere on the planet.