Mohammed Shaban

Life faced many challenges, as the Earth was a snowball more than 700 million years ago, which prompted scientists to ask: Could life have been created under these harsh conditions?

Life below the ice sheet
A recent study answered this question. According to the scientific journal BNS, which was published on December 2, life would not have flourished and had it not been for the thawing layers of the ocean’s ice to melt. Then the melted water formed the oxygen bubbles, which in turn made a way to the oceans to find a chemically created life awaiting them.

The mechanism, the sedimentologist Maxwell Licht of McGill University in Canada, explains this mechanism as reported by ScienceAlert, saying that "although most of the oceans were frozen and inoperable due to the lack of oxygen, with the beginning of the melting of the ice layers there is a permanent supply of oxygen-rich water .

This is what we call the “ice oxygen pump” through which air bubbles - previously captured during the ice age - were released into the water during the thawing of ice, and from this the oceans began enriching with oxygen.

Dissolved water was the bottleneck that enabled life to flourish (Wikimedia)

some people's disasters are other's benefits
Bacteria were the primary beneficiaries of these events, due to the bacteria's ability to adapt to the icy environment, as it used dissolved iron in water as a food source. With the availability of oxygen, the bacteria oxidized the iron and eliminated the oxides produced by depositing it.

Thus, you have left behind evidence of the existence of life, in sediments on the bottom of the sea. This enabled Licht and colleagues to rebuild the oxygen levels based on the oxidation levels present in the layers of these sediments. This is contrary to what scientists previously believed that life had withstood one way or another in pools of meltwater on the surface.

Scientists have studied iron formations on three continents, in Namibia, Australia and the United States of America. As the ratios of iron isotopes and cerium were an indication of the scarcity of oxygen in the water.

On the other hand, the closer we get to the end of the ice age, we find remarkably oxidizing deposits, which means that the closer we approach the sedimentary line separating the snowy Earth from our present Earth, we find these deposits rich in semantics of oxidation left by marine bacteria as a result of iron oxidation.

Arctic Arctic regions are a unique site for the study of virgin Earth stage (Wikimedia)

New interpretations and future visions
On the importance of this study, Galen Halverson of McGill University says, "This study not only provides an explanation of how life managed to conquer the Ice Age, but it also explains why iron deposits have reappeared in the geological record after they disappeared from it for a billion years. ".

The researchers also point out that we still need more research to know how the environment managed to maintain the food web, as the ecosystems currently present in the frozen polar regions abound with an amazing variety of life forms as we see them today, so researchers are thinking about studying them in the future.