During this time, the Earth was alternately subjected to the most severe ice age conditions it ever witnessed (with ice present even around the Equator), and then to widespread tropical greenhouse conditions, according to researchers.
“During these ice age events, any parts of the world that weren’t at that time submerged under the ocean would most probably have been barren, icy wastelands — including tourist destinations that are today considered tropical getaways.
“The extreme climates of the Snowball Earth period, together with the sudden and widespread appearance of very primitive multi-cellular lifeforms in a window of tropical climate between the period’s two major ice age events, make this one of the most enigmatic episodes in Earth’s history.
“A key question for scientists today is how these primitive lifeforms not only survived the extremely hostile temperatures of Snowball Earth’s ice age periods, but actually seemed to thrive during the wild fluctuations from ice age to tropical conditions and back to ice age.
“Indeed, it is thought that the extreme climates of this period may actually have provided the real kick-start that nature needed to get the process of evolution underway,” said lead researcher Stephen Gallagher of Geological Society of Australia.
However, according to the researchers, it’s certainly not as extreme as periods of climate change that Earth has experienced in its first five billion years, and it may not be as extreme that Earth will experience “in the five billion years remaining before it”.