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That long ago the Earth became so cold every inch of it was entombed in ice. The whole planet became one vast snowball that had lasted for ten million years. For years the snowball theory has been dismissed as impossible. Horizon: Snowball Earth, BBC 2001
Earth has no more terrible force than an ice-age. Only five times in its four billion years existence has our planet suffered this kind of catastrophe. ibid.
When [Brain] Harland presented his theory of global glaciation colleagues dismissed it as laughable. ibid.
Joe Kirschvink had cracked it: he had found the way out of the runaway freeze ... By 1990 Kirschvink had evidence that the tropics had frozen over for ten million years ... He had no physical evidence to prove the ice had melted because of an extreme greenhouse effect ... [Paul] Hoffman’s mission was to find that evidence that had eluded Kerschvink. ibid.
In 1998 Hoffman and [Daniel] Schrag made a triumphal tour of the world’s universities promoting the snowball theory. ibid.
For many biologists there seemed to be only one possible solution: there may have been a severe ice-age but not a fully fledged snowball that covered all the oceans because life-forms that should have died out are still with us. ibid.
The ice becomes clean and transparent. Because of this transparency life-giving sunlight would have been reaching down into the snowball seas. McKay realised that even at its height there would have been havens around the snowball’s equator where the ice is thin enough for photo-synthetic life to cling on below. ibid.
It may just be that the snowball saga was the biggest force for the development of life the world has ever seen. ibid.
No-one knows why the snowball happened or if it could happen again. ibid.
In the Atlantic waters north of Scotland, a fisheries researcher was the first to record a warning from the deep ... Ten years ago he began to see something in the water that really alarmed him. Turrell believes that he has found evidence that a climate catastrophe is heading right towards us. If he’s right then Britain could be heading for a massive drop in temperatures. It seems we could be heading for something like an Ice-Age. Horizon: The Big Chill, BBC 2003
The Little Ice-Age ... The coldest winter ever recorded was in 1683/4 ... Why did the sun’s spots disappear for fifty-odd years? Horizon: Global Weirding, BBC 2012
But there’s another force that has had perhaps the greatest effect on the landscape we see around us today: Ice. During the last Ice-Age most of Britain would have been covered with a great sheet of ice up to a mile thick. Tony Robinson, Birth of Britain: Ice, National Geographic 2010
The Northern Hemisphere was hit by the little Ice-Age. And on the south coast of Greenland two very different societies found themselves in the firing line. Man on Earth with Tony Robinson III: Killer Climate, Channel 4 2009
We call it the Little Ice-Age ... Cold enough to freeze the River Thames in London. ibid.
We call it the Little Ice-Age and it delivered two brutal blows to the inhabitants of medieval Europe ... The great famine ... The black death was one of the worst pandemics in history; it began not in Europe but in Asia as a direct consequence of the impact of climate change on rodents. Man on Earth with Tony Robinson IV: The Modern World, Channel 4 2008
650 million years ago the Earth froze. It pushed life to the verge of extinction. But if it hadn’t, life today would be little more than microscopic slime. This is the story of snowball Earth. Tony Robinson, Catastrophe II: Snowball Earth, Channel 4 2008
The planet froze. Temperatures plummeted. Ice spread down from the poles. It encased the planet in a layer thousands of metres thick. A snowball Earth. ibid.
Glaciers are nature’s bulldozers. ibid.
The term snowball Earth was coined by geologist Joe Kirschvink who has been gathering evidence on the theory for the past two decades. ibid.
Cyanobacteria were depleting them further. In combination with weathering they sucked the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and temperatures plummeted. ibid.
A catastrophic chain reaction pushed it to the point of no return. ibid.
Volcanoes are the only things on the planet hot enough and strong enough to thaw a frozen world. ibid.
An ice sheet could have masked the impact of a powerful impact 13,000 years ago. Tony Robinson, Catastrophe V: Survival Earth
20,000 years ago our planet was in the middle of an Ice-Age. Orbit: Earth’s Extraordinary Journey II, BBC 2012
Man moved into the north just when the climate there was turning to ice. Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man 1/13: Lower Than The Angels, BBC 1973
Just before complex life appeared the world was in the grip of the biggest Ice-Age in its entire history. David Attenborough’s First Life 1/2, BBC 2010
Snowball Earth ... It’s likely those conditions lasted for millions of years ... Life was nearly annihilated before it had barely begun. ibid.
Scientists are telling us we’re heading into a new ... Ice-Age? What? It’s from Time magazine Monday June 24th 1974. Fuck! Penn & Teller, Bullshit! s6e6: Being Green, Showtime 2008
In 1972 a group of eminent scientists sat down to write a letter to the President of the United States. They were frightened. The Earth’s climate seemed to be going haywire ... The letter warned the President he had to prepare not for global warming but for the complete opposite – a new Ice-Age. Iain Stewart, Earth: Climate Wars: The Battle Begins, BBC 2010
The IPPC says that unless we reduce the rate of greenhouse gas emissions, the greenhouse effect will intensify and warm up our planet. Glaciers and polar ice-caps will begin to melt, rivers will burst their banks, and sea-levels will rise, the deserts will expand ... Global Warming: Doomsday Called Off, 2004
The temperature data from the ice-sheets reveal long periods with much higher temperatures than those we experience today. They tell a fascinating tale of natural temperature fluctuations in the northern hemisphere from times when man had no influence on the climate whatsoever. Other core samples from elsewhere in Greenland confirm that the Little Ice-Age ended about a hundred and forty years ago at the coldest point in the last ten-thousand years. ibid.
Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph is unusual and scientists not attached to the United Nations climate panel have found it hard to swallow. ibid.
In The Weather Machine [1974] we reported the mainstream opinion of the time which was global cooling and the threat of a new Ice-Age. Nigel Calder
We should remember that when I was going to graduate school it was gospel that the new Ice-Age was about to start. And to tell the truth I had trouble warming up to that one too. Professor Patrick Michaels
Two and a half million years ago life on planet Earth faced the dawn of a new era: the Ice-Age. Now we can go back in time because out of the permafrost, from deep inside caves, and from hostile deserts, the astonishing remains of giant animals are emerging. The Ice-Age was the last time such creatures would walk the earth. Professor Alice Roberts, Ice-Age Giants I: Land of the Sabre-Tooth, BBC 2013
The last freeze started around eighty thousand years ago. ibid.
Los Angeles 40,000 years ago: the Sabre-toothed cat surveys her territory. Some of the richest hunting grounds in the Ice-Age world. ibid.
The Shasta Ground Sloth – as large as a grizzly bear. She walks on the sides of her feet. ibid.
Glyptodon: By far the oddest mammal I’ve ever seen: like an enormous armadillo with a trunk. ibid.
There hasn’t just been one Ice-Age but around twenty of them. ibid.
The greatest giant of them all ... The Columbian Mammoth: its tusks were magnificent, much longer than an elephant’s. ibid.
The tar has preserved dramatic stories of Ice-Age giants. ibid.