News Sport Weather Shop Earth Travel

ADVERTISEMENT

Home Record Breakers Origins Discoveries Video

Catastrophes Evolution

Earth was a frozen

Snowball when animals
first evolved

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.

For Charles Darwin, trying to demonstrate his theory

" of natural selection, this sudden burst of evolution
The Cambrian was a major problem. "The case must at present
explosion remains a remain inexplicable; and may be truly urged as a

puzzle valid argument against the views here entertained,"

he wrote in On the Origin of Species in 1859.

To this day the Cambrian explosion remains a

puzzle. But maybe a planet-encasing icy catastrophe could help explain it.

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.

Exactly how far the ice extended is still debated.

" Some argue that the entire Earth was encased in ice,
Most scientists agree with just a few small pockets of open water where hot

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.

"High phosphorus levels would have increased biological productivity and

organic carbon burial in the ocean, leading to a build-up of atmospheric
oxygen," says Noah Planavsky of Yale University in New Haven,
Connecticut. In 2010 he identified a massive spike in phosphorus levels in
sediments from around the world, just as Snowball Earth was ending.

That was suggestive, but in 2014 Planavsky found

" more direct evidence. His team estimated oxygen
Some animals can levels prior to Snowball Earth, by studying chromium
survive with much less which exists in different states depending on the

oxygen than amount of oxygen in the air in ancient rocks. Until

800 million years ago, atmospheric oxygen levels
previously thought
were just one-hundredth of today's levels.

Planavsky thinks that is far too low to support

complex animal life. "In modern low-oxygen environments there is less
ecosystem complexity and a more limited range of animal behaviours," says
Planavsky. "So it is reasonable to expect that an oxygen rise would pave the
way for animal and ecosystem diversification."

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.

For Boyle the real puzzle isn't the appearance of

" multicellular animals. Instead, it's the rise of cellular
Snowball Earth may differentiation cells with specific roles like liver,
have pushed animal muscle and blood. These specialised cells allowed

cells to specialise animals to become much more intricate. "What sets

animals apart from plants and fungi is this irreversible
cellular differentiation, which, for instance, is what
allows animals to have more cell types," 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.

Biologists have long known that animals are more

" likely to help close relatives, because by doing so
Most geologists don't they can benefit their own genes, which the relative
buy the idea of a hard will also carry. For example, wild animals are likely to

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.

Boyle's notion is controversial and other scientists are sceptical. "Boyle's

melt-hole idea for the origin of animals is fun," says palaeontologist Nick
Butterfield of the University of Cambridge, UK. "But most geologists don't
buy the idea of a hard Snowball Earth anymore, so the isolated hot-spring
refugia ponds wouldn't have actually existed."

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)

It would really help to find some definitive fossils to resolve this.

Unfortunately, the fossil record is very patchy in such ancient rocks. So far,
the oldest definitive fossils of complex animals date to around 560
million years ago. That could fit with either hypothesis.

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.

Nonetheless, recent discoveries hint that animal life

" may have started to gain a foothold during Snowball
It is no coincidence Earth. In 2014, Malcolm Wallace of the University of
that these animal Melbourne in Australia discovered strange clumps of

precursors appear fossils in remote regions of Australia and Namibia. In

the remains of ancient reefs, Wallace found bubble-
right after the
shaped fossils up to 3cm across. Many of the
Snowball bubbles appeared to interconnect into a network of
finger-like strands.

"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.

So far, animals more complex than sponges, with

" specialised organs that do different jobs, have only
Butterfield suspects we been found in rocks laid down after the Snowball.
have got the whole Boyle predicts that they will never be found in older

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)

"Animals have an enormous capacity to modify physical environments," says

Butterfield. So he thinks the first animals upset the delicate balance of ocean
chemistry, with knock-on effects for the rest of the planet.

Animals can certainly have big effects on the planet.

" For instance, burrowing animals like worms can
The first animals could break up rocks faster. The resulting rock dust reacts
have thrown Earth with carbon dioxide in the air, and the minerals

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.

They are also a sobering reminder of how quickly

" conditions on Earth can change. Our planet has been
Whether our planet just right for us for thousands of years, but there is no
goes hot or cold, it will reason to believe it will stay that way.

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)

Share this article:

ADVERTISEMENT
Related Stories

Viral Videos

How did life spark into being?

Explore the origin and meaning of life in under three minutes

Life


Strange & Beautiful

The original plants and animals

Protists are the ancestors of all plants and animals

Plankton

Origins

How predators changed the world

How the 'art of killing' changed evolution

Evolution
Follow BBC Earth

Facebook

Twitter


Youtube

Instagram

Unmissable Stories
Little Questions

Do we really eat spiders at night?

Supposedly we all swallow seven every year

Spider

Origins Almost human

The secret origin of HIV How Neanderthal DNA

We know where the pandemic began
shaped us all
They have left a powerful legacy in our genes
Virus
Neanderthal


Video

We went troll hunting in

Iceland
What we found was the truth behind the myths

Myth

Ads by Google
British Expat In The UAE?
Avoid Losing 55% Of 70k+ Pensions Get Your Free Expat Pension Review!
your.expatpensionreview.com

Expat Living In The UAE?

50k-1m Or 500+ Regular Savings? Review Your Interest Rates Today!
expatsavingsreview.com

Bachelor, Masters, PhD

Earn a Degree in your time with AIU self paced, and affordable program.
www.aiu.edu/

More amazing Earth stories

Catastrophes Extreme Life

When life on Earth nearly died The animal that lives for
forever 10,000 years
At one point in history, almost all life on Earth One creature can survive for millennia in the so-
disappeared. Now we know why called 'Sea of Death'

Extinction Crustacean

Strange & Beautiful Video

Virgin births are almost Aussie bee is a real

commonplace headbanger
Many animals can give birth without mating The bee uses its head like a pneumatic drill

Sex Insect

Bizarre Cosmic Objects Extreme Life

The place where galaxies are The bird that drinks blood
colliding And eight other vampire-like creatures
The impact may be the most violent crash ever
Food
Galaxy

Around the BBC

 Future Future

Explore astronaut Tim What would the flag of Mars

Peake's new home look like?

Culture Culture

Was Frank Sinatra really Is this the perfect city?

dangerous?

Capital Capital

The hidden genius of George Are you ruining your own

Lucas career?

Explore the BBC

News Sport

Weather Shop

Earth Travel

Capital Culture

Autos Future

TV Radio

CBBC CBeebies

Food iWonder

Bitesize Music

Arts Make It Digital

Taster Nature

Local

Terms of Use About the BBC

Privacy Policy Cookies

Accessibility Help Parental Guidance

Contact the BBC Advertise with us

Ad choices

Copyright 2015 BBC. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read about our approach to
external linking.