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Catastrophes Evolution
715 million years ago the entire planet was encased in snow and ice. This
frozen wasteland may have been the birthplace of complex animals
By Kate Ravilious
12 January 2015
The ice brought Earth to a standstill. Where there were once waves lapping
onto a tropical shore and warm waters teeming with life, there was just the
whistling of the wind and a cold barren landscape, covered in ice as far as
the eye could see. Even at the equator the warmest place on Earth the
average temperature was a frigid -20C, equivalent to modern-day
Antarctica. Most life was wiped out, and the creatures that did survive
huddled in small pockets of open water, where hot springs continued to
bubble up.
This was "Snowball Earth" a deep freeze that began around 715 million
years ago and held Earth in its icy grip for a good 120 million years. "There
are no other comparable glacial periods on Earth. This one was really quite
catastrophic," says Graham Shields of University College London in the UK.
However, some scientists now believe that this crushing catastrophe drove
one of the most incredible steps in evolution: the development of the first
animals, and a dramatic flourishing of life known as the Cambrian explosion.
Trilobites like these first evolved during the Cambrian (Credit: Sinclair Stammers / NPL)
Around 540 million years ago, a host of exotic creatures suddenly appeared.
They included giant woodlouse-like creatures known as trilobites, the five-
eyed Opabinia, and the spiny slug-like Wiwaxia. Suddenly, Earth leapt from
being dominated by single-celled bacteria to a world teeming with exotic
multicellular creatures, all in a geological blink of an eye.
When Earth was a frozen snowball (Credit: Stocktrek Images, Inc. / Alamy)
The evidence for a Snowball Earth first emerged in the early 1990s.
Unexpectedly, geologists discovered evidence of glaciers such as stones
that had clearly been carried on ice rafts and then dropped - in the tropics.
Since then, a growing body of evidence has shown that the global deep
freeze began around 715 million years ago, and lasted nearly 120 million
years.
that the Snowball springs bubbled up. Others believe that a belt of
open water remained around Earth's equator.
formed suddenly
Regardless of how far the ice stretched, most
scientists agree that the Snowball formed suddenly. It
was probably caused by rapid weathering of Earth's continents, which
sucked carbon dioxide a planet-warming greenhouse gas out of the
atmosphere and caused temperatures to plummet. There were two distinct
pulses of extreme glaciation, interspersed with a 20-million-year warm
period. Finally, around 660 million years ago, Earth's volcanoes topped up
the atmospheric carbon dioxide enough to haul the climate out of its frozen
state.
So why on Earth would this period of extreme cold cause life to switch gear
so rapidly? Maybe, say many geologists, because it pumped lots of life-giving
oxygen into the air.
There may have been a few ice-free patches (Credit: NASA, CC by 2.0)
The idea is that the ice gave a boost to microscopic plants, which released
oxygen as a waste product. During the Snowball, the glaciers would have
worn huge amounts of phosphorus-rich dust away from the underlying rocks.
Then, when the ice retreated at the end of the Snowball, rivers washed this
dust into the oceans, where it fed the microbes.
But there's a problem with that idea. Experiments published in 2014 showed
that some animals can survive with much less oxygen than previously
thought. Sponges, one of the oldest kinds of animal, need just 0.5% of
modern oxygen levels. That suggests oxygen wasn't enough of a trigger.
Sponges may have been the first complex animals (Credit: Matt Kleffer, CC by 2.0)
In recent years another idea has come to prominence. Maybe it was the ice
itself that drove the evolutionary leap, says Richard Boyle of the University
of Southern Denmark in Odense. "There are no animals more complex than
a sponge prior to the last of the Snowball glaciation events, and in my
opinion this is not coincidence," says Boyle.
It's hard to see how this could have evolved, because specialised cells lose
the ability to reproduce on their own. Instead they have to be distinctly self-
sacrificing, cooperating with other cells in the body for the greater good of the
animal. Only the specialised reproductive cells, the sperm and eggs, get to
create a new generation.
By contrast, plants don't just rely on specialist sex cells to reproduce. They
can also reproduce themselves from cuttings taken from their stems or roots.
"You can't take a cutting from an animal," says Boyle. He thinks the severity
of Snowball Earth may have pushed animal cells to abandon this flexibility,
and specialise.
Cells have to work together to make animals (Credit: icelight, CC by 2.0)
"During the Snowball period, life will have been confined to small
geothermally heated areas, and will have experienced frequent extinctions
and population crashes," says Boyle. The populations that did survive were
often reduced to just a handful of organisms. Boyle suggests that these little
groups of survivors were often closely related, encouraging them to
cooperate more than usual.
Snowball Earth adopt orphans that are related to them, but not
orphans that are unrelated. Boyle thinks that
anymore
Snowball Earth may have forced cells to behave
altruistically. "Until that point, the cost of being an
animal cell had been too high," he says.
Butterfield argues that life probably retreated to the open waters of the
tropics during Snowball times, but otherwise carried on as normal.
The cradle of complex life? (Credit: Luis Alejandro Bernal Romero, CC by 2.0)
Genetics doesn't help much either. By working backwards through the animal
family tree and estimating rates of genetic change, scientists have estimated
that the first animals are likely to have emerged around 750 million years
ago. But these "molecular clock" estimates are notoriously unreliable.
"These fossils are big and complex, but they don't really fit exactly into any of
the animal phyla," says Wallace. They date from around 700 million years
ago, soon after Earth first became a Snowball.
So Wallace and his colleagues think they may have found the precursors to
animals very early sponge-like creatures, which lived in low-oxygen waters
and represented a halfway stage between single-celled microbes and
multicellular animals. And they think it is no coincidence that these animal
precursors appear right after the first major Snowball glaciation.
The ice quickly overwhelmed the planet (Credit: Andrew Adams, CC by 2.0)
"Intuitively, you might think that Snowball Earth would hinder evolution, and
yet animals appear soon after the big glaciations," says Wallace. "It seems
clear that these big glaciations have disrupted the Earth's ocean-atmosphere
system in some way that was favourable for complex life to develop."
Boyle agrees that this kind of primitive animal life may have evolved before
the end of Snowball Earth, but he argues that this wasn't the crucial step.
Instead, the key threshold is when individual cells forgo their ability to
reproduce, and instead take on specific roles within an animal.
story backwards rocks, certainly not in rocks laid down before the
Snowball. "If such fossils are found then my
hypothesis will be proven incorrect," he says.
Butterfield agrees that such ancient animal fossils may never turn up, but that
could simply be because they haven't been preserved. He now suspects that
Boyle, Planavsky and Wallace have got the whole story backwards. Instead
of the ice creating complex animals, he suggests that the first animals
appeared 750 million years ago and transformed the planet, cooling the
climate. "I think there is a good case to be made for the evolution of animals
actually triggering the glaciations," says Butterfield.
Did the first animals somehow freeze the Earth? (Credit: Derek Keats, CC by 2.0)
into a deep freeze produced get washed into the oceans removing the
carbon dioxide from the air. Meanwhile, marine
animals boost oxygen levels by eating the remains of
dead organisms, which would otherwise consume
oxygen. Butterfield also thinks animals may have driven the evolution of new
microscopic plants that sank faster, taking carbon dioxide with them.
There is some evidence that the first animals could have thrown Earth into a
deep freeze. In 2011, Eli Tziperman of Harvard University in Cambridge,
Massachusetts and his colleagues modelled the chemical cycles in the
ocean. They found that the evolution of new marine organisms could have
helped transport more carbon to the ocean floor and forced a major change
in climate. "It's certainly not unreasonable to suggest that the evolution of
animals initiated glaciation," says Butterfield.
Ice affects life, and life affects ice (Credit: pclvv, CC by 2.0)
Right now there's not enough information to decide whether animals created
Snowball Earth, or Snowball Earth triggered animal evolution. But either way,
the two events are linked.
be a seriously bumpy
Right now our appetite for fossil fuels is hotting things
ride
up dangerously fast. But a large asteroid impact, like
the one that did for the dinosaurs, would throw up
enough dust to block sunlight and cause a dangerous
chill. And because today's oceans are cooler than they were in the
dinosaurs' time it's conceivable that the oceans would freeze and Earth
would revert to a Snowball state.
Whether our planet goes hot or cold, it will be a seriously bumpy ride. Maybe
we should learn from those early animal cells, and learn to work together.
Once, the entire Earth was covered in ice and snow (Credit: Ed Coyle, CC by 2.0)
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