Resumen de Scott's dirty ice may solve mystery
A bizarre region of "dirty" Antarctic ice, discovered a century ago by British explorer Captain Robert Scott's team, might hold clues on how life survived when Earth turned into a giant snowball hundreds of millions of years ago. Warwick Vincent at Laval University in Canada and his colleagues were the first to argue that life survived Snowball Earth atop the ice. "Dirty ice is a compelling analogue for Snowball Earth ecosystems," he says. Life might even have thrived and evolved on Snowball Earth, if modern dirty ice is any guide. "This is not just an invisible microbial world, eking out an existence at the edge of life," says Vincent. "It's the polar equivalent of an Amazonian rainforest." "The important thing is that such environments would have been extensive on Snowball Earth, approximately 12 per cent of global surface area," says Paul Hoffman at Harvard University.
