Paleoproterozoic glaciation

The Paleoproterozoic glaciation is an ice age that began about 2.3 billion years ago at the transition between the Archaic and Proterozoic and lasted about 300 million years. It is also called the Archaic Ice Age or the Huron Ice Age . The stratification sequences found in the area of Lake Huron allow a reconstruction of the glacier movements of that time. This so-called Gowganda formation consists of finely layered clay stones; they are banded clays that were deposited in stagnant waters off the glaciers. Some of them contain dropstones . Layers of clay stones alternate with fossil block loams ( tillites ) and thus reflect the periodic advance of the glaciers into the water body.

Geological climate witnesses, including paleomagnetic evaluations from North America, Scandinavia, India and southern Africa indicate a global cold snap with a longer-lasting snowball earth event .

A possible cause for this icing is the great oxygen catastrophe or a long-lasting phase of globally low volcanic activity.

swell

• The paleoproterozoic glaciation . Website of the FU Berlin, accessed on May 30, 2016

• Evans, DA; Beukes, NJ; Kirschvink, JL: Low-latitude glaciation in the Palaeoproterozoic era . In: Nature . 386, No. 6622, March 1997, pp. 262-266. bibcode : 1997Natur.386..262E . doi : 10.1038 / 386262a0 .

• Robert E. Kopp, Joseph L. Kirschvink, Isaac A. Hilburn, Cody Z. Nash: The Paleoproterozoic snowball Earth: A climate disaster triggered by the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis . In: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA . 102, No. 32, 2005, pp. 11131-11136. bibcode : 2005PNAS..10211131K . doi : 10.1073 / pnas.0504878102 . PMID 16061801 . PMC 1183582 (free full text).

• Phillip W. Schmidt, George E. Williams: Paleomagnetism of the Lorrain Formation, Quebec, and Implications for The Latitude of Huronian Glaciation (PDF), Geophysical Research Abstracts, Vol. 5, 08262, 2003.