Harvard Scientists Solve 56-Million-Year Snowball Earth Mystery

Hundreds of millions of years ago, Earth endured what appeared to be an impossibly long frozen silence — yet life persisted, and the rocks never quite explained how. Harvard researchers have now proposed that the Sturtian glaciation was not a single unbroken catastrophe but a rhythm of freeze and thaw, each cycle driven by the ancient tension between volcanic breath and the slow hunger of weathering stone. In reframing one of Earth science's deepest mysteries, they offer not only an answer about our own planet's survival, but a new lens through which to ask whether life might endure similar or