Earth’s climate has changed, within life-sustaining bounds, from warm to cool intervals, on scales from thousands to hundreds of millions of years. In the Phanerozoic Eon there have been three intervals of glaciation (Ordovician, Carboniferous and Cenozoic) lasting tens of millions of years, with ice down to sea level at mid-latitudes (Frakes et al., 1992; Crowell, 1999). These cool “icehouse” intervals were generally times of lower sea level, lower CO2 percentage in the atmosphere, less net photosynthesis and carbon burial, and less oceanic volcanism than during alternating “greenhouse” intervals (Fischer, 1986). The transitions from Phanerozoic icehouse to greenhouse intervals were synchronous with some biotic crises or mass extinction events, reflecting complex feedbacks between the biosphere and the hydrosphere.
Figure I8 summarizes Earth’s entire paleoclimate history, and Figure I9shows the better-known Phanerozoic Eon, with carbon, strontium and sulfur isotopic ratios that are...
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Link, P.K. (2009). “Icehouse” (Cold) Climates. In: Gornitz, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology and Ancient Environments. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4411-3_112
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