A remote cluster of Scottish islands could help solve one of our planet’s greatest mysteries, scientists say.
The Garvellach islands off the west coast of Scotland are the best record of Earth entering its biggest ever ice age around 720 million years ago, researchers have discovered.
The big freeze, which covered nearly all the globe in two phases for 80 million years, is known as “Snowball Earth”, after which the first animal life emerged.
Clues hidden in rocks about the freeze have been wiped out everywhere – except in the Garvellachs. Researchers hope the islands will tell us why Earth went into such an extreme icy state for so long and why it was necessary for complex life to emerge.
Layers of rock can be thought of as pages of a history book – with each layer containing details of the Earth’s condition in the distant past.
But the critical period leading up to Snowball Earth was thought to be missing because the rock layers were eroded by the big freeze.
Now a new study by researchers at University College, London, has revealed that the Garvellachs somehow escaped unscathed. It may be the only place on Earth to have a detailed record of how the Earth entered one of the most catastrophic periods in its history – as well as what happened when the first animal life emerged when the snowball thawed hundreds of millions of years ago.
Back then Scotland was in a completely different place because the continents have moved over time. It was south of the Earth’s equator and had a tropical climate, until it and the rest of the planet became engulfed in ice.
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