Abstract:
The ‘Snowball Earth’ model of Hoffman et al. [Science 281 (1998) 1342] has stimulated renewed interest in the causes of glaciation in Earth history and the sedimentary, stratigraphic and geochemical response. The model invokes catastrophic global Neoproterozoic refrigerations when oceans froze, ice sheets covered the tropics and global temperatures plummeted to −50 °C. Each event is argued to be recorded by tillites and have lasted up to 10 million years. Planetary biological activity was arrested only to resume in the aftermath of abrupt and brutal volcanically generated ‘greenhouse’ deglaciations when global temperatures reached +50 °C. The ‘Cambrian explosion’ is regarded by some as a consequence of post-Snowball glacioeustatic flooding of continental shelves. We shall show by a systematic review of the model that it is based on many long standing assumptions of the character and origin of the Neoproterozoic glacial record, in particular, ‘tillites’, that are no longer valid.
