So i am, once again, reading the Novel Fallen Angels.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_A ... n_novel%29
And i find myself asking:
Snowball Earth? Really?
How feasible of a scenario is it exactly?
And what would have to happen for it to actually come to pass?
Discuss. Cuss. Rant. All are welcome to vent about stuff relephant to the topic at hand.
It's a snow world after all...
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It's a snow world after all...
Welcome, to IronHell.
Shrapnel wrote:TFwiki wrote:Soon is the name of the region in the time-domain (familiar to all marketing departments, and to the moderators and staff of Fun Publications) which sees release of all BotCon news, club exclusives, and other fan desirables. Soon is when then will become now.
Peculiar properties of spacetime ensure that the perception of the magnitude of Soon is fluid and dependent, not on an individual's time-reference, but on spatial and cultural location. A marketer generally perceives Soon as a finite, known, yet unspeakable time-interval; to a fan, the interval appears greater, and may in fact approach the infinite, becoming Never. Once the interval has passed, however, a certain time-lensing effect seems to occur, and the time-interval becomes vanishingly small. We therefore see the strange result that the same fragment of spacetime may be observed, in quick succession, as Soon, Never, and All Too Quickly.
If I remember earth history from my geology classes, it's actually happened at least once. Or at least there's some evidence Earth came pretty close to it, with most of the world being covered by ice. The tropics stay pretty free of ice, as a rule. The temperate regions...it depends.
One of the ways...Earth goes into ice ages when there's a continent sitting on a pole. Ice forms more easy on land, it doesn't get thrown about by tides, it acts as a big-ass air chiller for the entire atmosphere. We're technically in an ice age right now (just a glacial minima), thanks to Antarctica having continental glaciation and chilling shit down enough for Greenland to form it, too.
There's other things that can cause ice ages--the Earth's degree of inclination wobbles over time, which lets the earth get more/less direct sunlight over its whole surface, landmasses causing weird weather or ocean patterns (our climate has been largely moderated by a heat exchange going on in the Atlantic ocean where the coriolis effect and thermodynamics keep cold water water moving around where it gets warmed up; google for North Atlantic Deep Water and South Atlantic Bottom Water for further reading).
Any of these factors on its own can chill things out, but ice ages worth noting happen when they all combine in a feedback loop. Once stuff starts freezing over a decent area, that chills the atmosphere and oceans down more (making it easier to chill in a wider area) and ice being more reflective than water or land reflects more sunlight back into space, meaning the world is less warmed, weather patterns can change, stuff moves around less as the world cools off (which means more water gets frozen because it's not moving around that much). The feedback loops have diminishing returns, so they pretty much can't overcome the constant energy inputs from the sun totally, but it can, and quite possibly HAS happened. Snowball Earth sounds like a game over, but it'd thaw out eventually--probably once a continent moved its fat ass, but eventually.
One of the ways...Earth goes into ice ages when there's a continent sitting on a pole. Ice forms more easy on land, it doesn't get thrown about by tides, it acts as a big-ass air chiller for the entire atmosphere. We're technically in an ice age right now (just a glacial minima), thanks to Antarctica having continental glaciation and chilling shit down enough for Greenland to form it, too.
There's other things that can cause ice ages--the Earth's degree of inclination wobbles over time, which lets the earth get more/less direct sunlight over its whole surface, landmasses causing weird weather or ocean patterns (our climate has been largely moderated by a heat exchange going on in the Atlantic ocean where the coriolis effect and thermodynamics keep cold water water moving around where it gets warmed up; google for North Atlantic Deep Water and South Atlantic Bottom Water for further reading).
Any of these factors on its own can chill things out, but ice ages worth noting happen when they all combine in a feedback loop. Once stuff starts freezing over a decent area, that chills the atmosphere and oceans down more (making it easier to chill in a wider area) and ice being more reflective than water or land reflects more sunlight back into space, meaning the world is less warmed, weather patterns can change, stuff moves around less as the world cools off (which means more water gets frozen because it's not moving around that much). The feedback loops have diminishing returns, so they pretty much can't overcome the constant energy inputs from the sun totally, but it can, and quite possibly HAS happened. Snowball Earth sounds like a game over, but it'd thaw out eventually--probably once a continent moved its fat ass, but eventually.
Last edited by Maxus on Sun Feb 08, 2015 6:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
He jumps like a damned dragoon, and charges into battle fighting rather insane monsters with little more than his bare hands and rather nasty spell effects conjured up solely through knowledge and the local plantlife. He unerringly knows where his goal lies, he breathes underwater and is untroubled by space travel, seems to have no limits to his actual endurance and favors killing his enemies by driving both boots square into their skull. His agility is unmatched, and his strength legendary, able to fling about a turtle shell big enough to contain a man with enough force to barrel down a near endless path of unfortunates.
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
--The horror of Mario
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath. He is a terrible person and a hack at writing and art. His cultural contributions are less than Justin Bieber's, and he's a shitmuffin. Go go gadget Googlebomb!
Stress causing additional volcanic eruptions and greenhouse effect from gasses are what I read as being a rip-cord to break the cycle of a snowball earth.
Ah, yay, wikipedia even has a full article on snowball earth.
Ah, yay, wikipedia even has a full article on snowball earth.