SNOWBRAWLS - Snowball Earth - page 75

EIGHT
SNOWBRAWLS
“How can anyone look at these deposits and still be talking about a Snowball?” Martin Kennedy
thumped his fist against the dashboard in frustration. He was in a truck with several other geologists,
heading north towards the long, thin ribbon of Death Valley in California, and as the ground fell further
and further below sea level, Martin's blood pressure was rising.
Martin is tall, slender, half Australian and half American. He is thirty-eight. He's intense and ornery,
but this is coupled with bursts of humour that make him unexpectedly good company. 1 He can launch in-
to a sudden fury, and then pull himself out of it just as quickly. (During a brief period working at Exxon,
he underwent the regulation psychological tests, which determined that he was a “red” person, categor-
ized as highly aggressive. He was, he says, disappointed. “I was kind of hoping to be blue-green.”) His
hair is short, brown and slightly curly. The corners of his eyes are crinkled with laughter lines. Martin
has boyish features, a button nose and thin lips that can make him look engaging or petulant, depending
on circumstances. He has a pathological aversion to authority.
Martin hadn't meant to pursue a career in geology. Initially he had intended to run a farm in Aus-
tralia, where “you can live by your own hand”. He would probably have done so if the purchase hadn't
fallen through. Though he's now based in the relative civilization of the University of California's
Riverside campus in Los Angeles, he's happiest in the Australian Outback, where he's done fieldwork
for many years. He trusts himself, resents interference, and instinctively challenges received wisdom.
Martin had become increasingly outraged by the claims that Paul and Dan were making for their
Snowball theory, and was now a key player in Nick Christie-Blick's stated quest to find an alternative.
In November 2000, he had joined a small field trip that was visiting some Snowball rocks in Death
Valley. The trucks headed north through the valley, hugging the east side of the central saltpan. At first
the sand was hazy with low, olive-green saltbushes, but the vegetation gradually disappeared, and by
the time the trucks reached the sluggish saline pools of Bad Water, the lowest point below sea level in
the western hemisphere, there was just bare sand streaked with salt.
Lining the sides of the valley were mountain peaks, sometimes jagged, sometimes rounded. From a
geological perspective, all the mountains are recent upstarts. Around 13 million years ago, a mere snip
compared to the Snowball timescales, this part of the Southwest was fairly flat, dipping off the back
slope of the Sierra Nevada. Then the land began to stretch. As the crust thinned, cracks opened in its
surface. Some parts fell downwards to make long, thin valleys, while others were thrust upwards into
mountains. The whole area today is riddled with these stretch marks. And thanks to the overhead thin-
ning, volcanoes sprang up from the deep and spilled their magma on to the Earth's surface. Many of the
mountains left from that turbulent time are piled with lava, the rocks painted in a desert palette of burnt
sienna and ochre, chocolate, Venetian red and tan.
The Snowball rocks that Martin had come to see hailed from a time long before the Earth's erratic
bucking threw up these mountains and opened these valleys. They come not from 13 million years ago,
but 600 million years ago and more, eons before dinosaurs roamed North America, in fact before any-