TY  - JOUR
A1  - de Vrese, Philipp
A1  - Stacke, Tobias
A1  - Caves Rugenstein, Jeremy
A1  - Goodman, Jason
A1  - Brovkin, Victor
T1  - Snowfall-albedo feedbacks could have led to deglaciation of snowball Earth starting from mid-latitudes
Y1  - 2021-05-14
VL  - 2
IS  - 1
JF  - Communications Earth & Environment
DO  - 10.1038/s43247-021-00160-4
PB  - Nature Publishing Group UK
N2  - Simple and complex climate models suggest a hard snowball – a completely ice-covered planet – is one of the steady-states of Earth’s climate. However, a seemingly insurmountable challenge to the hard-snowball hypothesis lies in the difficulty in explaining how the planet could have exited the glaciated state within a realistic range of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Here, we use simulations with the Earth system model MPI-ESM to demonstrate that terminal deglaciation could have been triggered by high dust deposition fluxes. In these simulations, deglaciation is not initiated in the tropics, where a strong hydrological cycle constantly regenerates fresh snow at the surface, which limits the dust accumulation and snow aging, resulting in a high surface albedo. Instead, comparatively low precipitation rates in the mid-latitudes in combination with high maximum temperatures facilitate lower albedos and snow dynamics that – for extreme dust fluxes – trigger deglaciation even at present-day carbon dioxide levels.
N2  - Snowball Earth could have thawed at atmospheric CO2-levels comparable to the present as a result of low surface albedo in mid-latitudes from a combination dust deposition and low precipitation rates, according to Earth System Model simulations
UR  - http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?gldocs-11858/11140
ER  -