INTRODUCTION In the Earth’s history,the Late Ediacaran to Early Cambrian period witnessed a series of profound changes in both Earth’s interior and surficial systems which may have made this planet more habitable fo...INTRODUCTION In the Earth’s history,the Late Ediacaran to Early Cambrian period witnessed a series of profound changes in both Earth’s interior and surficial systems which may have made this planet more habitable for the first radiation of early animals(known as the global occurrence of Ediacaran biota;Xiao and Narbonne,2020).Among those changes,the Late Ediacaran glaciation,soon followed and accompanied by the early complex life of Ediacaran biota,attracted much attention of scientists and may have provided a good opportunity to investigate the interactions between the Earth’s surficial environment and the biosphere(e.g.,Xu et al.,2024;Zhang et al.,2023;Hoffman et al.,2017).To achieve this goal,the nature of the glaciation itself needs to be understood first.Until now,32 or more Ediacaran glacial deposits have been documented on almost all the existing continents(Niu et al.,2024;Wang et al.,2023a,b,c),showing a similar distribution pattern to the two Cryogenian(Sturtian and Marinoan)Snowball Earth glaciations if plotted in one single paleogeographic map(Figure 1;Niu et al.,2024;Li et al.,2013).But further compared to the Cryogenian Snowball Earth glaciations,the Late Ediacaran glaciation has some fundamentally different characteristics:(1)as shown in Figure 1,most glacial deposits are not stratigraphically overlain by the typical cap carbonate while it usually happened in the aftermath of a Snowball Earth glaciation and represented an abrupt climatic switch from extreme icehouse(global freezing)to greenhouse(global warming)condition(Hoffman et al.,2017).展开更多
基金funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China(No.2023YFF0803604)。
文摘INTRODUCTION In the Earth’s history,the Late Ediacaran to Early Cambrian period witnessed a series of profound changes in both Earth’s interior and surficial systems which may have made this planet more habitable for the first radiation of early animals(known as the global occurrence of Ediacaran biota;Xiao and Narbonne,2020).Among those changes,the Late Ediacaran glaciation,soon followed and accompanied by the early complex life of Ediacaran biota,attracted much attention of scientists and may have provided a good opportunity to investigate the interactions between the Earth’s surficial environment and the biosphere(e.g.,Xu et al.,2024;Zhang et al.,2023;Hoffman et al.,2017).To achieve this goal,the nature of the glaciation itself needs to be understood first.Until now,32 or more Ediacaran glacial deposits have been documented on almost all the existing continents(Niu et al.,2024;Wang et al.,2023a,b,c),showing a similar distribution pattern to the two Cryogenian(Sturtian and Marinoan)Snowball Earth glaciations if plotted in one single paleogeographic map(Figure 1;Niu et al.,2024;Li et al.,2013).But further compared to the Cryogenian Snowball Earth glaciations,the Late Ediacaran glaciation has some fundamentally different characteristics:(1)as shown in Figure 1,most glacial deposits are not stratigraphically overlain by the typical cap carbonate while it usually happened in the aftermath of a Snowball Earth glaciation and represented an abrupt climatic switch from extreme icehouse(global freezing)to greenhouse(global warming)condition(Hoffman et al.,2017).
