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Palaeoclimate

Marinoan meltdown

Nature Geoscience volume 1, pages 351–353 (2008)Cite this article

The termination of the Marinoan glaciation 635 million years ago is one of the most spectacular climate change events ever recorded. Methane release from equatorial permafrost might have triggered this global meltdown.

Imagine that the planet Earth fell into a seemingly perpetual deep freeze. As thick ice caps formed, sea levels would drop by hundreds of metres, turning huge tracts of previously submerged continental shelf into Arctic wasteland. Imagine now, after millions of years, how such an icescape might begin to thaw. This is exactly what geologists have been trying to do for decades, as they have been struggling to piece together the puzzle of what happened at the end of a glaciation that may have covered the entire planet in ice. Several hypotheses have sprung up, one of which suggests that a massive expulsion of methane from previously frozen ground set in motion runaway global warming and sea-level rise due to the melting of glaciers. In their article in Nature, Kennedy et al.1 mount support for this 'methane release hypothesis' by identifying evidence for a mix of methane and glacial meltwater directly below the recognized global marker for the end of this glaciation.

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Figure 1: Yellow-coloured vertical pipes of carbonate cement formed by oxidation of methane ∼635 million years ago at Marino rocks, South Australia.

MARTIN KENNEDY

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  1. Graham Anthony Shields is in the Department of Earth Sciences, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. gshields@uni-muenster.de,

    Graham Anthony Shields

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Shields, G. Marinoan meltdown. Nature Geosci 1, 351–353 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo214

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