The initiation of modern soft and hard Snowball Earth climates in CCSM4
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract. Geochemical and geological evidence has suggested that several global-scale glaciation events occurred during the Neoproterozoic Era in the interval from 750–580 million years ago. The initiation of these glaciations is thought to have been a consequence of the combined influence of a low level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and an approximately 6% weakening of solar luminosity. The latest version of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM4) is employed herein to explore the detailed combination of forcings required to trigger such extreme glaciation conditions under present-day circumstances of geography and topography. It is found that runaway glaciation occurs in the model under the following conditions: (1) an 8–9% reduction in solar radiation with 286 ppmv CO2 or (2) a 6% reduction in solar radiation with 70–100 ppmv CO2. These thresholds are moderately different from those found to be characteristic of the previously employd CCSM3 model reported recently in Yang et al. (2012a,b), for which the respective critical points corresponded to a 10–10.5% reduction in solar radiation with 286 ppmv CO2 or a 6% reduction in solar radiation with 17.5–20 ppmv CO2. The most important reason for these differences is that the sea ice/snow albedo parameterization employed in CCSM4 is believed to be more realistic than that in CCSM3. Differences in cloud radiative forcings and ocean and atmosphere heat transports also influence the bifurcation points. These results are potentially very important, as they are to serve as control on further calculations which will be devoted to an investigation of the impact of continental configuration. We demonstrate that there exist ''soft Snowball'' Earth states, in which the fractional sea ice coverage reaches approximately 60–65%, land masses in low latitudes are covered by perennial snow, and runaway glaciation does not develop. This is consistent with our previous results based upon CCSM3. Although our results cannot exclude the possibility of a ''hard Snowball'' solution, it is suggested that a ''soft Snowball'' solution for the Neoproterozoic remains entirely plausible.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".