The ice age was a time of great coldness and darkness that occurred over a period of about 100,000 years. The climate during the ice age was very harsh, with temperatures often dropping below freezing. Animals and plants had to adapt to these conditions by shrinking in size or Changing their habitats. Humans also had to adapt by learning how to survive in an environment where food was scarce. The cold weather caused the glaciers to grow and spread, which made the climate very harsh. The lack of sunlight created long periods of darkness, which made life difficult for the animals and plants that lived during that time.
Life on earth faced many challenges during the initial stages. Life faced many challenges like extreme hot climate, toxic gases, acid rains, etc. life survived under all these conditions. During the ice age, the earth was like a white snowball. The ice age is also known as the Cryogenian period because of a greater lower degree of temperature. The ice age period existed between 720-635 million years earlier. Because of the large amount of ice during that period, anyone can think that there was a very less amount of oxygen. If the oxygen is present in very less amounts, life can’t grow. But the fossils of this period are evidence that there was the existence of life. So life survived during the ice age and bloomed. According to sedimentology Maxwell Lechte, many of the oceans was uninhabitable due to the less amount of oxygen created by layers of ice on the top of oceans.
Life during the ice age survived because of the glacial pumps. The glacial pump is nothing but oxygen trapped inside the ice in the form of a bubble. This oxygen goes into the oceans when the ice melts inside the water. The research team studied the formation of iron around all 3 continents. Total, cerium anomalies & iron isotope ratios from glaciomarine surroundings reveal that the waters were extremely oxygen-deprived – but the closer one draws to the ice-shelf foundation line, the more oxidized the credits grow. This eukaryotic life that lived around those aerated water pools would also have wanted food for a living. And this iron may be a lot of the existence of life.
Sweet water is a rich dissolved iron. There is one kind of bacterthatich draws the energy from this iron and grows during its entire life. So the iron deposits found near the ice grounding line may be created by this kind of bacteria. There is no hard evidence for this study, but it is one of the closest theories for the evolution of life during the ice age.
