Here is another song from Jesse Ferguson’s 2013 album, Shift, “Snowball Earth.” It is nice to hear original folk music. It is a story song. He wrote of it, “The snowball earth theory suggests that snow/ice once covered the entire surface of the earth. This song imagines two lovers surviving it.” Ah, the imaginings of love by the young!

The Snowball Earth hypothesis is the idea that almost a billion years ago, the earth was entirely covered in ice. I don’t accept it. But the earth’s climate has been bizarre over very long time scales. I just don’t see how it all fits in with Milankovitch forcing. Certainly now we live in a period where the earth naturally has four periods: green Greenland; icy Greenland; icy Canada; and icy US. Glaciers over Mexico is hard to imagine. The oceans frozen is even harder to imagine. And there is no obvious mechanism for it to end. This all would have happened before the Cambrian explosion, however. So if the Snowball Earth really did exist, it could have been ended by life itself, giving more credence to the Gaia hypothesis.

Regardless, this is a beautiful song: