Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected
34 points
by wglb
3 hours ago
| 2 comments
| sciencex.com
| HN
dmix
1 hour ago
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TIL about silicate weathering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate%E2%80%93silicate_cyc...

silicate rocks basically traps co2 over millions of years and causes temperatures to fall

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prawn
1 hour ago
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chris_va
36 minutes ago
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It's really the alkalinity (e.g. the Mg++ or Ca++), which silicate rocks often have (but technically not limited to silicates).

As an aside, we need to dissolve roughly one large mountain into the mix layer (top ~50m) of the ocean to have it fully take up atmospheric CO2. Without dissolving, the reaction is very slow (co2 in atmosphere => slightly lower pH rain => reaction with mostly passivated rock + erosion).

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wglb
3 hours ago
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Paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525919123
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