Response of the Snowball Earth Climate to Orbital Forcing at a High CO2 Level

How the climate responded to orbital forcing during the Neoproterozoic snowball Earth events, the most extreme glaciations on Earth, is still unclear. Here, we investigate this problem using a climate model. To simplify the anal-ysis, continents are removed. The results show that even in this simplified situation, the snowball Earth climate is sensitive to orbital configurations. The globally averaged annual surface temperature can differ by 2.4 & DEG;C, and the maximum monthly mean temperature can differ by 3.7 & DEG;C under different orbital configurations. Therefore, a snowball Earth could be deglaci-ated more easily in some orbital configurations than in others. The climatic effect of a particular orbital parameter is highly dependent on the values of other parameters. For example, the effect of obliquity on tropical surface temperature is gener-ally small (,1 & DEG;C), but it can become large (3.8 & DEG;C) when eccentricity is large and the northern autumn occurs at perihelion (precession 5 180 & DEG;). Surprisingly, the global temperature is generally lower at high eccentricity than at near-zero eccentricity, even though the total insolation received by Earth is higher in the former than in the latter. Moreover, we find that the Milankovitch hypothesis is valid not only in the extratropical region, but also in the tropics; the snow thickness in the tropical region is inversely proportional to the maximum monthly insolation received in this region.

Automated summary

Using a climate model, we found that the snowball Earth climate is sensitive to orbital configurations, even in a simplified situation. Different orbital configurations can lead to significant differences in global average annual surface temperature and maximum monthly mean temperature. The climatic effect of a specific orbital parameter is dependent on the values of other parameters.