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SNOWBALL EARTH

Popular Mechanics US|January - February 2025
IMAGINE A PLANET WHERE THE AVERAGE temperature is a delightful -58° Fahrenheit every day. Not a place you'd want to visit, right? Lucky for you, then, that you weren't around several hundred million years ago, because these brutal conditions were the unfortunate reality of the "Snowball Earth."
- Emma Frederickson
SNOWBALL EARTH

Between roughly 640 and 720 million years ago, Earth was covered pole to pole with slush and ice. During two major ancient freezes, the way our planet must have looked from space at the time has prompted the nickname Snowball Earth. And now, researchers may have just found the world's most complete record of this period of glaciation in part of a rock formation known as the Port Askaig Foundation.

This story is from the January - February 2025 edition of Popular Mechanics US.

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SNOWBALL EARTH
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This story is from the January - February 2025 edition of Popular Mechanics US.

Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.

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