According to new research, the cool conditions that make ice sheets form on Earth are rare events in Earth’s history and require many complex processes immediately.
A team of scientists led by Leeds University investigated why the Earth is known as a “greenhouse” state for much of its history, and the conditions we live in are so rare.
They found that the current ice cover state of the earth is not a typical feature of the earth’s history and can only be achieved through lucky coincidence.
Many ideas have been proposed before to explain the cold chambers known in the history of the Earth. These include reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from volcanoes or increase carbon storage through forests, or the reaction of carbon dioxide with certain types of rocks.
The researchers performed the first combined test of all these cooling processes in a novel long-term 3D model of the Earth developed by the University of Leeds. This type of “Earth Evolution Model” was only recently made possible through computational advances.
They concluded that no process can drive these cold climates, and cooling actually requires a combined effect. Their findings were published in the Journal today (February 14, 2025) Science progress.
These findings will help reconcile debates in the geoscience community, involving processes responsible for driving these cold times.
Lead author Andrew Meredith, PhD, who worked at the University of Leeds’ School of Earth and Environment, said the study helped explain why ice house countries are so rare.
“We now know that the ice sheets we live on Earth (rather than planets without hockey) are due to the accidental combination of very low global volcanism rates and highly dispersed continents, which allow a lot of global rainfall and therefore amplify from the atmosphere The reaction to remove carbon,” he explained.
“The important implication here is that the natural climate regulation mechanism of the planet seems to favor a warm and high CO2 world without ice caps rather than some of the glaciers and low CO2 worlds we have today.
“We believe that this general trend of warm climates helps prevent devastating ‘snow Earth’ glaciers around the world, which only rarely happens and therefore helps life continue to flourish.”
Benjamin Mills, professor of Earth Systems Evolution at the Leeds Institute of Earth and Environment, oversaw the project. He added that the results of this study are of great significance to global warming and the near future.
“There is an important message that we should not expect the Earth to always return to its cold state as it did in the pre-industrial era,” he said.
“The current state of the earth covered by ice is not a typical feature of Earth’s history, but our current global society relies on it.
“We should do everything we can to preserve it, and we should carefully assume that if we drive excessive warming before we stop emissions, the cold climate will recover. In a long history, the earth loved it, but our human society did not like.”
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