Key Points
The first single-celled organisms arose sometime during roughly the first billion years of the planet's existence...
Sometime between 720 million to 635 million years ago Earth froze twice and if anyone would have seen it from the outside, the planet would have appeared like a snowball..
The findings published in the journal Nature Geoscience state that the two global Snowball Earth events known as the Sturtian and Marinoan ice ages during the Cryogenian Period between 720635million years ago played a key role in the evolution of the Earth-life system...
Earth as seen from space. The findings solidify the idea that it was more of a "Slushball Earth" where the earliest forms of complex life - basic multicellular organisms - endured even at mid-latitudes previously thought to have been frozen solid..
Scientists are trying to better understand the onset of Snowball Earth and the study co-author Shuhai Xiao said that it is widely believed that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels plummeted just prior to these events, causing the polar ice caps to expand and hence more solar radiation reflected back to space and the polar ice caps expanded further..
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