P V Sukumaran took his M.Tech degree in Applied Geology from the University of Saugar and has been working with the Geological Survey of India since 1974. His interests include petrology, geochemistry, palaeoceanography and organic evolution. He has contributed several articles to Resonance.

According to the hypothesis of ‘snowball earth’ the planet was covered in toto with ice for millions of years in two major pulses of global glaciation in the Proterozoic era of earth history. The earlier event of snowball earth is less understood but the subsequent one has overwhelming evidence in the geological record of rock strata. Accelerated chemical weathering on tropically positioned continental masses is believed to have withdrawn excess CO2 from the atmosphere, initiating global cooling and eventually plunging the whole earth under ice cover. Accumulation of volcanically emitted CO2 in the atmosphere during glacial ice cover melted the ice by greenhouse warming bringing back normalcy.

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Address for Correspondence

P V Sukumaran
Director
Geological Survey of India
Alandi Road
Pune-411006
Email: gsi_pune@vsnl.com
pvs34@yahoo.co.uk