The idea rests on a curious property of seawater. When ocean water freezes, most of the salt is expelled from the ice crystals, concentrating in pockets of brine. But as temperatures drop far below the normal freezing point of seawater, the brine itself becomes saturated and the salt begins to precipitate out as solid crystals. For the entire seawater system, this eutectic point sits at about minus 36 degrees Celsius. Crucially, laboratory experiments and field measurements by other research groups have shown that these salt crystals, particularly the mineral hydrohalite, are extraordinarily reflective, with an albedo of about 0.93, meaning they bounce back nearly all of the sunlight that strikes them. Fresh snow is one of the few natural surfaces that can compete.

For such crystals to matter climatically, they must sit at the surface where sunlight can reach them. This is where the peculiar atmospheric circulation of Snowball Earth comes in. Previous modeling work by Raymond Pierrehumbert, Dorian Abbot, and colleagues indicates that on a fully glaciated planet, a net ablation zone would have existed at lower latitudes, a band where sublimation of ice exceeds precipitation. There, the frozen ocean surface would have been slowly eaten away by the dry air, exposing bare sea ice for thousands of years. As that ice sublimated, any salt crystals precipitating within it would have been left behind, accumulating into what scientists call a lag deposit, a reflective crust of salt sitting directly on the tropical sea ice.

Samuelsberg and his colleagues asked a simple question: what happens if you add this salt-albedo feedback to a climate model? To find out, they used a diffusive one-dimensional energy balance model, a classic and well-studied framework that describes the zonal mean surface temperature of the planet. The model balances incoming solar radiation against outgoing longwave radiation, redistributes heat from the equator toward the poles through diffusion, and includes the Planck response along with the familiar nonlinear ice-albedo feedback. The team modified the model’s albedo function so that latitudes colder than a critical isotherm carry snow or ice albedo, bare sea ice in the net ablation zone carries a lower albedo, and any region where temperatures fall below the eutectic temperature takes on the extremely high albedo of the salt deposit.

Solving the model analytically using boundary integral methods, the researchers traced out bifurcation diagrams showing all the stable and unstable climate states the system can occupy as radiative forcing changes. The results were striking. In addition to the familiar hothouse, high-latitude ice line, and Snowball Earth states, and the Waterbelt states with a tropical water belt produced by the so-called Jormungand mechanism, the salt feedback gave rise to two new, stable, coexisting Snowball Earth states: one with a salt deposit covering the bare sea ice of the deep tropics, and one without. The salt-deposit state is significantly colder than its salt-free counterpart, because its surface reflects so much more sunlight. Several unstable states with smaller or multiple salt deposits also appeared in the analysis.

Which of these states would the real Snowball Earth have occupied? To answer this, the team applied a test previously used to evaluate Waterbelt hypotheses: a candidate climate state must be accessible from a warm climate, and it must persist over a large range of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, consistent with the well-established hysteresis loop in which the planet plunges into glaciation and later escapes as carbon dioxide builds up. The geological record adds a constraint here, because the roughly 1.5 billion years before the Neoproterozoic glaciations, known as the Proterozoic glacial gap, show no evidence of ice sheets, meaning the climate system must have rested in a warm, largely ice-free state before the plunge.

The verdict was unambiguous. For plausible model parameters, the Snowball Earth state without a salt deposit is essentially inaccessible from a warm climate. Instead, once global glaciation begins and temperatures in the tropical ablation zone fall below the eutectic point, the salt-albedo feedback activates and drives the system into the colder, salt-covered state. The analysis showed that this outcome is robust: higher rates of meridional heat diffusion and larger ice-albedo contrasts favor the direct transition, and no matter at what temperature the salt precipitation begins, the system ultimately collapses into the fully salt-covered state. Only very large bare sea ice regions combined with extremely low eutectic temperatures would allow the planet to avoid it. In other words, it may have been very difficult for Snowball Earth to cool down without salt crystals amplifying the chill.

The findings carry implications for one of the thorniest puzzles surrounding Snowball Earth: how the planet ever deglaciated. In the model, escaping the salt-deposit state requires a substantially higher atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration than escaping the classical salt-free state, because the reflective salt crust suppresses the warming that volcanic carbon dioxide would otherwise deliver. Several earlier modeling efforts have tried to lower the carbon dioxide deglaciation threshold to match geochemical proxy data, and the new results suggest that if a salt deposit persisted for a significant time, it would have raised that threshold even further, making the escape from global glaciation harder to explain. The authors also note that the full seawater system contains numerous salt species that begin precipitating well above the eutectic temperature, with mirabilite crystallizing around minus 8 degrees and hydrohalite around minus 23 degrees, meaning some salt precipitation could be expected even before the deepest cold set in, potentially helping to trigger the glaciation in the first place.

Important caveats remain, and the authors are careful to frame the work as an initial investigation. The simplified model includes no ice dynamics, yet it is widely recognized that thick sea glaciers must have formed and flowed equatorward on Snowball Earth, gradually freshening the ice in the ablation zone as meteoric ice arrived from higher latitudes. Previous work by Jacob Goodman found that only a narrow band of marine ice remained near the equator over million-year timescales, so the salt deposit probably became less climatically important in the later stages of the glaciations, and the study cannot determine how long such a deposit lasted. The strength of the feedback is also uncertain: clouds can mask the albedo of both bare sea ice and salt crusts, surface dust may gradually dim the crystals, and winds could blow salt into regions of net precipitation, keeping larger areas salt-free. Yet even with a lower assumed crystal albedo, the qualitative structure of the model’s solutions holds. What the study establishes is that salt precipitation, long absent from Snowball Earth simulations, is a physical process powerful enough to reshape the planet’s climate trajectory, and one that future models of Earth’s deepest freeze can no longer afford to ignore.

Subject of Research: A salt-albedo feedback from precipitated salt crystals on tropical sea ice amplifying cooling during Snowball Earth

Article Title: Amplified cooling of Snowball Earth from a salt-albedo feedback

Article References: Amplified cooling of Snowball Earth from a salt-albedo feedback. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-22-1499-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/cp-22-1499-2026

Keywords: Snowball Earth, salt-albedo feedback, sea ice, hydrohalite, eutectic temperature, energy balance model, Neoproterozoic, albedo, climate modeling, degaciation, hysteresis, Climate of the Past

The mystery at the centre of the study is a familiar one to palaeontologists. Animals appear relatively suddenly in the fossil record just before the Cambrian Period, which ran from 539 to 487 million years ago, yet a growing body of indirect evidence suggests their evolutionary history began much earlier. Molecular clock analyses, which compare genetic differences between living species and work backwards using fossil dates as calibration points, have repeatedly hinted at a deep pre-Ediacaran origin. But many recent studies have constrained those estimates using a seemingly straightforward argument drawn from the fossil record itself, and it is precisely that argument which the new work dismantles.

The argument hinges on an exceptionally well-preserved fossil deposit in China known as the Weng’an Biota, found in rocks of Ediacaran age and dated to roughly 590 million years ago. The Weng’an Biota preserves microscopic organisms in extraordinary cellular detail, yet none of the fossils it contains can be definitively identified as animals. Researchers have therefore inferred that the first animals must have originated after Weng’an, reasoning that a deposit capable of preserving such delicate structures would certainly have captured animal embryos or larvae if animals existed at the time. In effect, Weng’an has been treated as a maximum age constraint, a hard ceiling on how old animals could possibly be.

The Oxford-led team, which included researchers from the University of California Berkeley, ETH Zürich and Yale University, tested that logic by surveying a younger deposit with comparable preservation quality: the Kheseen Biota of Mongolia. The Kheseen Biota is more than 40 million years younger than Weng’an, yet the two deposits share some species, and by the time Kheseen was laid down animal fossils were already known from sites elsewhere in the world, including Namibia and South China. The researchers examined more than 140 samples, some from previously undocumented localities, using scanning electron microscopy to resolve fine anatomical detail at the microscopic scale.

The results were striking. The Mongolian material yielded exquisite new microfossil species, including acritarchs, tiny spherical organisms adorned with spines and branching projections, as well as embryo-like fossils preserving internal cells. The quality of preservation rivals anything seen in the Ediacaran record. Yet despite this remarkable fidelity, not a single specimen could be confidently assigned to the animal kingdom. Animals were demonstrably alive when the Kheseen Biota formed, but they left no trace within it, a direct contradiction of the preservation-based reasoning applied to Weng’an.

Senior author Associate Professor Ross Anderson of the Museum of Natural History at Oxford University explained the significance of the finding. The Kheseen Biota, he said, breaks the argument that the exceptional microfossils of Weng’an mean animal fossils would have been seen in the assemblage had they existed at the time. The Kheseen microfossils are just as well-preserved, yet animals continue to be absent, despite the fact that they are known to have existed by that point. The most plausible explanation is that early animals lived in environments different from those that preserved the Kheseen fossils, or that the local chemical conditions after death simply failed to preserve animal remains.

With the Weng’an ceiling removed, the team rebuilt their molecular clock analyses using much older geological constraints. They turned to fossil-rich deposits dating from roughly 850 to 730 million years ago, including the Svanbergfjellet Formation in Norway, the Bitter Springs Group in Australia and the Chuar Group in Arizona. These deposits have the potential to preserve animals even though definitive animal fossils have eluded discovery within them, and they have previously served as maximum dates for animal origins in other studies. When the molecular clock was anchored to these older formations rather than to the Ediacaran Weng’an deposit, the estimated origin of animals shifted backwards by around 200 million years, landing between 800 and 700 million years ago.

That timeline is not without independent support. Chemical fossils, known as biomarkers, preserved in ancient rocks provide evidence consistent with sponges living at least 650 million years ago, tens of millions of years before the oldest definitive macroscopic animal fossils appear. The molecular clock estimate also raises a provocative possibility: animals may already have evolved before Earth entered the Cryogenian glaciations, or even emerged during that inhospitable interval. The Cryogenian Period began around 720 million years ago, when enormous glaciers spread across the planet in episodes commonly known as Snowball Earth. The new study reopens the question of whether the dramatic environmental conditions associated with those global ice ages played a role in the origin and early evolution of animal life, a possibility that had been closed off under the younger Ediacaran timeline.

First author Orin Lole Durbin, who conducted the work as an undergraduate at Oxford and is now at Virginia Tech, cautioned that the analysis does not prove animals existed 800 million years ago. Pre-Ediacaran animal body fossils still elude researchers, and the molecular clock provides an estimate rather than a direct observation. However, the new fossil evidence from Mongolia undermines one of the main arguments for restricting animal origins to the Ediacaran interval, while the molecular-clock analyses show how much further back their evolutionary history could extend. The distinction matters: the study does not claim to have found ancient animals, but it removes a key obstacle to the idea that they existed far earlier than the rocks currently reveal.

Part of the reason early animals remain so elusive lies in their biology. The first animals would have been small and soft-bodied, lacking the shells, bones and other hard structures that make later animals so much easier to fossilise. Whether such creatures were preserved at all depended on their environment and on an unusual combination of chemical conditions after death, conditions that evidently failed in the Kheseen setting even as exquisite microfossils of other organisms formed. The researchers argue that future work should therefore explore fossil deposits from different parts of the world, representing different environments and modes of fossilisation, in the search for animals. Such searches should also weigh all available lines of evidence, including body fossils, traces of animal activity and chemical biomarkers, rather than relying on any single signal. Until that evidence becomes available, as Anderson noted, the precise birth date of the animal kingdom remains uncertain, but the window of possibility has now swung dramatically open toward the deep Neoproterozoic.

Subject of Research: Re-evaluating fossil calibration constraints on the molecular clock timing of animal origins

Article Title: New study suggests animals may have evolved vastly earlier than fossil evidence suggests

Article References: New study suggests animals may have evolved vastly earlier than fossil evidence suggests. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: animal origins, molecular clock, Ediacaran, Neoproterozoic, Weng'an Biota, Kheseen Biota, Snowball Earth, Cryogenian, microfossils, sponges, Cambrian explosion, fossil record