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lectures > lectures spring 2003

Snowball Earth

Speaker: Gabrielle Walker
14th June 2003

This lecture is about a radical new theory -- "Snowball Earth" -- which holds that 600 million years ago the entire Earth was covered with a blanket of ice nearly a mile thick, and temperatures fell to a hundred degrees (F) below those of today. When this snowball finally melted ten million years later, a climate backlash sent temperatures to the hottest they have ever been, and unleashed torrential downpours of acid rain. If this vision is true, Earth can experience sudden lurches in climate that are more violent, and deadly, than anyone had ever imagined. But even more important, this climate catastrophe could also have triggered the beginning of multicellular life, and thus the evolution of most life on Earth today -- including humans.

The lecture will discuss the scientific evidence for and against this extraordinary idea, and describe the remote and beautiful research sites around the world that have yielded such evidence. It will also uncover the motivations behind the main protagonists -- especially that of Paul Hoffman, the brilliant maverick Professor of Geology at Harvard University who has brought the idea into the scientific limelight.

Gabrielle Walker has travelled in search of science stories to all seven continents -- including a stint at the South Pole. She has climbed trees in the Amazon rainforest, used a geological hammer to pull fresh lava from a volcano in Hawaii, and dodged icebergs while sailing around Cape Horn. She has a PhD in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and has been an editor at Nature and Features Editor at New Scientist, for whom she now acts as consultant. She has also taught writing as a Visiting Professor at the Department of Geosciences, in Princeton University.
An award-winning writer of more than sixty pieces for New Scientist, she has also written for The Economist, The Independent, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. She is a frequent studio guest and presenter for the BBC. Her first book, Snowball Earth, has just been published by Bloomsbury.