Resilience of Snowball Earth to Stochastic Events

Abstract

Earth went through at least two periods of global glaciation (i.e., ``Snowball Earth'' states) during the Neoproterozoic, the shortest of which (the Marinoan) may not have lasted sufficiently long for its termination to be explained by the gradual volcanic build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Large asteroid impacts and supervolcanic eruptions have been suggested as stochastic geological events that could cause a sudden end to global glaciation via a runaway melting process. Here, we employ an energy balance climate model to simulate the evolution of Snowball Earth's surface temperature after such events. We find that even a large impactor (diameters of $d\sim 100\mathrm{km}$) and the supervolcanic Toba eruption ($74\mathrm{kyr}$ ago), are insufficient to terminate a Snowball state unless background CO${}_2$ has already been driven to high levels by long-term outgassing. We suggest, according to our modeling framework, that Earth's Snowball states would have been resilient to termination by stochastic events.

Accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL)