Climate dynamics in deep time: Modeling the "Snowball bifurcation" and assessing the plausibility of its occurrence

The apparently global scale glaciation events that occurred during the Neoproterozoic era, in the interval from 750 Ma to 550 Ma, represent a significant challenge to our understanding of climate system behavior. If these episodes of glaciation were truly of "snowball" type, with the continents covered by thick ice-sheets and the oceans entirely capped by sea ice, then special pleading is required to understand the Cambrian explosion of life that occurred subsequently. Detailed models of Neoproterozoic climate, however, suggest the plausibility of preference for "equatorial refugium" or "oasis" solutions in which significant regions of open water are able to persist at the equator. We describe further analyses of such solutions in this paper, using both simple EBM coupled ice sheet models and fully articulated atmosphere-ocean-sea ice coupled models of climate evolution. Recently published analyses of the dynamics of the Neoproterozoic carbon cycle, taken together with the predictions of the models discussed herein, are strongly supportive of the equatorial refugium solutions as the most plausible form of the Neoproterozoic cooling events.