Evidence found in Colorado may prove the Earth was once covered in ice

DENVER (KDVR) — New evidence recently uncovered in Colorado by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder may prove the entire planet was completely covered in massive glaciers hundreds of millions of years ago.

The evidence is notable for people who believe in "Snowball Earth," which is a theory that posits that from around 720 to 635 million years ago, the earth's climate was drastically changed for reasons that are still unclear, according to a release.

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This caused temperatures across the world to drop. According to this theory, ice sheets that could have been several miles thick covered the earth.

The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author of the study was Liam Courtney-Davies, a postdoctoral researcher of geological sciences at CU Boulder.

Co-authors for the study include Rebecca Flowers, a professor of geological sciences at CU Boulder, and researchers from Colorado College, the University of California Santa Barbara and the University of California Berkeley.

The study centers around a series of rocks found in Colorado's Rocky Mountains and presents the first physical evidence that these ice sheets reached areas in the middle of continents at the Earth's equator.

These rocks, nicknamed Tavakaiv or "Tava," are sandstones. One of the most notable places where these Tava sandstones can be found is around Pikes Peak.

For most people, they look like ordinary yellow to brown rocks that run in vertical bands less than an inch to many feet wide, according to the release.

Researchers used a dating technique called laser ablation mass spectrometry. During this, minerals are zapped with lasers to release some of the atoms inside.

This determined that the stones may have been forced underground around 690 to 660 million years ago, likely from the weight of the large glaciers that pressed down on them.