Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
ults at a single academic meeting,
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but never wrote them up. Joe put together his thoughts about the
Snowball in a tiny two-page paper, in which he gave his idea about the volcanoes just a few paltry
sentences.
8
The paper took four years to come out in an obscure topic, a vast monograph read only by
the highly committed.
Joe still can't explain fully why he didn't grab his brilliant idea and run with it. Years later, when
he read Paul Hoffman's work, he was chagrined. “Damn it. Why didn't I think of that?” But by then
he had moved on to other things, tugged by his graduate students into their areas of interest. Perhaps
he simply didn't have enough confidence in his deep freeze. It was one more “nutty” idea among the
rest.
Still, Joe had made the strongest case to date that there was once ice at the equator. He had envis-
aged a worldwide freezeover, and found a way out of the worst problem the idea faced. In a way, he
had put the story together. What was needed now was evidence that he was right. Was there any sign
left on Earth of his global super-greenhouse? Could anyone really show what had been happening to
life in the oceans when the Snowball was in progress, and during its heated aftermath?
Meanwhile, Joe contributed another essential item to the story. Brian Harland had called this global
freeze the Great Infra-Cambrian Glaciation. Joe was made of snappier stuff. He remembered as a child
moving from Arizona to Seattle, where he endured three miserable freezing winters. At first the wet
Seattle snow bemused him, but he quickly learned to pack it around a rock to make a snowball that had
maximum impact. What was Harland's Infra-Cambrian Glaciation but snow packed around a rocky
planet? Joe rechristened the glaciation with the name it has borne ever since: Snowball Earth.
He also did one more thing, something that would prove crucial. At a conference in Washington,
D.C., in 1989, Joe found himself chatting with Paul Hoffman over dinner. Paul was still working in
Canada at the time. He hadn't even encountered the Namibian ice rocks then. But as they ate, Joe
cheerily told Paul about his latest crazy theory. That night he planted a seed in Paul's mind, and when
Paul found crucial Snowball clues in the ice rocks of Namibia, the seed began to germinate.
