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Military veterans are disproportionately affected by suicide, but targeted prevention can help reverse the tide

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theconversation.com – Jordan Batchelor, Research Analyst at the Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety, Arizona State University – 2024-11-07 07:41:00

Mounting evidence shows that veterans need targeted suicide prevention services.

adamkaz/E+ via Getty Images

Jordan Batchelor, Arizona State University; Charles Max Katz, Arizona State University, and Taylor Cox, Arizona State University

America’s military veterans make up about 6% of the adult population but account for about 20% of all suicides. That means that each day, about 18 veterans will die by suicide.

In the U.S., the overall rate of suicide has largely increased since the start of the millennium, but veterans are disproportionately represented among this tragic trend.

Each of these losses affects not only the individual but also their families, friends and co-workers. Thus, working to prevent suicide and its underlying causes is important not only to protect our loved ones but also to foster happier, safer communities.

We are a team of researchers at Arizona State University’s Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety. We manage the Arizona Violent Death Reporting System, a surveillance system sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and part of the larger national surveillance system that operates in all U.S. states, Puerto Rico and Washington. We gather information on suicides through agreements with the Arizona Department of Health Services, medical examiners and law enforcement.

Solder in uniform walks hand in hand with two young girls, one on each side, looking up at him.

Individual statistics do not capture the true extent of loss that ripples through a person’s entire family and social network.

Peathegee Inc/Tetra Images via Getty Images

Assessing risk amid uncertainty

Military veterans range from 18 years of age to more than 100, include both men and women, and represent diverse races and ethnicities. As of 2018, the largest veteran cohort were those who served during the Vietnam War, followed by those who served during peacetime only, the Gulf War and post-9/11 conflicts.

Identifying the true risk of veteran suicide, especially relative to the general population, is a surprisingly difficult task. In past decades, researchers and stakeholders debated about which figures were most accurate, those showing veterans at increased risk or those showing the opposite. Such debates often stemmed from methodological factors.

However, mounting evidence shows that veterans need targeted suicide prevention services, and our data backs this up. From 2015 to 2022, the age-adjusted suicide rates among male veterans in Arizona outpaced those of nonveterans by a factor of 1.49 to 1.88. Put another way, while veterans in Arizona made up only 8.4% of the population in 2022, they represented 20.3% of the state’s suicides, meaning veterans were 2.5 times more likely to die by suicide.

While these numbers stem from Arizona, they also reflect the national trends showing greater and growing rates of suicide among veterans.

Why are veterans at greater risk?

One reason is that, compared to nonveterans, a greater proportion of veterans are white, male and older – demographic categories with elevated rates of suicide in the general population. For example, in Arizona, about 97% of veteran suicides between 2015 and 2022 were men, compared with 75% in the comparable nonveteran population.

Other explanations relate to veteran-specific factors. Some argue that military training and combat exposure can reduce a person’s fear of pain or death, putting suicidal veterans at greater risk of completing suicide. Military training also familiarizes a person with the use of firearms, a particularly lethal means of suicide. Statistics show that veterans, including female veterans, die by suicide using firearms more so than the general population. This tendency to use firearms as the method of suicide leads to more fatal suicide attempts.

At the Arizona Violent Death Reporting System, we collect data on circumstances that precede and may have contributed to suicide, which can help identify risk factors. While we’ve found that veterans often exhibit fewer such factors overall, certain demographic categories do display risk factors.

For example, a higher proportion of veterans ages 18 to 54 had a diagnosed mental health problem – primarily post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. In addition, more male veterans ages 65 and older had physical health problems that contributed to their suicide compared with similar nonveterans.

This highlights the need to encourage veterans to share their mental or physical health struggles with others, which will prevent veterans from struggling alone. Large-scale initiatives are trying to tackle this issue, but we can also raise awareness and reduce stigma around suicide on a local level.

Shining a light on the problem

In 1999, then-Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher highlighted suicide as a serious public health crisis, paving the way for tackling the monumental issue on a national scale.

Now, 25 years later, the U.S. government continues to emphasize the increasingly dire situation. Most recently, the Biden administration released a 2024 national strategy aimed at establishing strategic directions for improving mental health treatment and reducing suicide.

Historically, health care facilities operated by the Veterans Health Administration have been a central resource for veterans experiencing mental or physical problems. This continues to be true: While the overall population of veterans is decreasing, the number of veterans who seek resources from the organization has increased. Encounters between veterans and the Veterans Health Administration offer opportunities to screen for suicide risk and offer resources for those in need.

Crisis lines are a potentially effective means of prevention. For example, the Veterans Crisis Line has been shown to reduce a caller’s immediate distress and suicidality. Many callers have found the crisis line helpful, with responders providing both effective intervention and compassionate support.

Education and policy provide another means of suicide prevention. As firearms are a particularly lethal means of suicide, a great deal of research funding has gone toward understanding their role in suicide. Studies generally find that reducing access to guns is associated with reduced suicide rates. As a result, both general and veteran-specific suicide prevention efforts highlight the importance of handling guns safely and storing them securely.

If you know a military veteran, keep an eye out for warning signs of mental distress, which may display in a person’s words, feelings or behavior.

For example, they may display intense anxiety, agitation or desperation, or express a sense of hopelessness. Veterans diagnosed with depressive syndrome, PTSD or both may be at greater risk.

For a person who is considering suicide, even the slightest hope can mean the difference between life and death.

If you or someone you know is experiencing signs of crisis, the free and confidential 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available to call, text or chat.

If you are a veteran and would like to speak with responders trained to understand your unique circumstances, call 988 and then press 1.The Conversation

Jordan Batchelor, Research Analyst at the Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety, Arizona State University; Charles Max Katz, Director of the Center for Violence Prevention and Community Safety, Arizona State University, and Taylor Cox, Program Coordinator, School of Criminology & Criminal Justice, Arizona State University

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I’m a neuroscientist who taught rats to drive − their joy suggests how anticipating fun can enrich human life

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theconversation.com – Kelly Lambert, Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Richmond – 2024-11-11 07:21:00

Rats will choose to take a longer route if it means they get to enjoy the ride to their destination.
Kelly Lambert, CC BY-ND

Kelly Lambert, University of Richmond

We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal. Before long, they were steering with surprising precision to reach a Froot Loop treat.

As expected, rats housed in enriched environments – complete with toys, space and companions – learned to drive faster than those in standard cages. This finding supported the idea that complex environments enhance neuroplasticity: the brain’s ability to change across the lifespan in response to environmental demands.

After we published our research, the story of driving rats went viral in the media. The project continues in my lab with new, improved rat-operated vehicles, or ROVs, designed by robotics professor John McManus and his students. These upgraded electrical ROVs – featuring rat-proof wiring, indestructible tires and ergonomic driving levers – are akin to a rodent version of Tesla’s Cybertruck.

As a neuroscientist who advocates for housing and testing laboratory animals in natural habitats, I’ve found it amusing to see how far we’ve strayed from my lab practices with this project. Rats typically prefer dirt, sticks and rocks over plastic objects. Now, we had them driving cars.

But humans didn’t evolve to drive either. Although our ancient ancestors didn’t have cars, they had flexible brains that enabled them to acquire new skills – fire, language, stone tools and agriculture. And some time after the invention of the wheel, humans made cars.

Although cars made for rats are far from anything they would encounter in the wild, we believed that driving represented an interesting way to study how rodents acquire new skills. Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the “lever engine” before their vehicle hit the road. Why was that?

Some rats training to drive press a lever before their car is placed on the track, as if they’re eagerly anticipating the ride ahead.

The new destination of joy

Concepts from introductory psychology textbooks took on a new, hands-on dimension in our rodent driving laboratory. Building on foundational learning approaches such as operant conditioning, which reinforces targeted behavior through strategic incentives, we trained the rats step-by-step in their driver’s ed programs.

Initially, they learned basic movements, such as climbing into the car and pressing a lever. But with practice, these simple actions evolved into more complex behaviors, such as steering the car toward a specific destination.

The rats also taught me something profound one morning during the pandemic.

It was the summer of 2020, a period marked by emotional isolation for almost everyone on the planet, even laboratory rats. When I walked into the lab, I noticed something unusual: The three driving-trained rats eagerly ran to the side of the cage, jumping up like my dog does when asked if he wants to take a walk.

Had the rats always done this and I just hadn’t noticed? Were they just eager for a Froot Loop, or anticipating the drive itself? Whatever the case, they appeared to be feeling something positive – perhaps excitement and anticipation.

Behaviors associated with positive experiences are associated with joy in humans, but what about rats? Was I seeing something akin to joy in a rat? Maybe so, considering that neuroscience research is increasingly suggesting that joy and positive emotions play a critical role in the health of both human and nonhuman animals.

With that, my team and I shifted focus from topics such as how chronic stress influences brains to how positive events – and anticipation for these events – shape neural functions.

Two rats in a 'car' made of an open glass box and four wheels
Rats hitting the road in their custom-made cruisers.
Kelly Lambert, CC BY-ND

Working with postdoctoral fellow Kitty Hartvigsen, I designed a new protocol that used waiting periods to ramp up anticipation before a positive event. Bringing Pavlovian conditioning into the mix, rats had to wait 15 minutes after a Lego block was placed in their cage before they received a Froot Loop. They also had to wait in their transport cage for a few minutes before entering Rat Park, their play area. We also added challenges, such as making them shell sunflower seeds before eating.

This became our Wait For It research program. We dubbed this new line of study UPERs – unpredictable positive experience responses – where rats were trained to wait for rewards. In contrast, control rats received their rewards immediately. After about a month of training, we expose the rats to different tests to determine how waiting for positive experiences affects how they learn and behave. We’re currently peering into their brains to map the neural footprint of extended positive experiences.

Preliminary results suggest that rats required to wait for their rewards show signs of shifting from a pessimistic cognitive style to an optimistic one in a test designed to measure rodent optimism. They performed better on cognitive tasks and were bolder in their problem-solving strategies. We linked this program to our lab’s broader interest in behaviorceuticals, a term I coined to suggest that experiences can alter brain chemistry similarly to pharmaceuticals.

This research provides further support of how anticipation can reinforce behavior. Previous work with lab rats has shown that rats pressing a bar for cocaine – a stimulant that increases dopamine activation – already experience a surge of dopamine as they anticipate a dose of cocaine.

The tale of rat tails

It wasn’t just the effects of anticipation on rat behavior that caught our attention. One day, a student noticed something strange: One of the rats in the group trained to expect positive experiences had its tail straight up with a crook at the end, resembling the handle of an old-fashioned umbrella.

I had never seen this in my decades of working with rats. Reviewing the video footage, we found that the rats trained to anticipate positive experiences were more likely to hold their tails high than untrained rats. But what, exactly, did this mean?

Rat beside a small house, its tail curved up like an umbrella handle
Rat tails can signal how they’re feeling.
Kelly Lambert, CC BY-SA

Curious, I posted a picture of the behavior on social media. Fellow neuroscientists identified this as a gentler form of what’s called Straub tail, typically seen in rats given the opioid morphine. This S-shaped curl is also linked to dopamine. When dopamine is blocked, the Straub tail behavior subsides.

Natural forms of opiates and dopamine – key players in brain pathways that diminish pain and enhance reward – seem to be telltale ingredients of the elevated tails in our anticipation training program. Observing tail posture in rats adds a new layer to our understanding of rat emotional expression, reminding us that emotions are expressed throughout the entire body.

While we can’t directly ask rats whether they like to drive, we devised a behavioral test to assess their motivation to drive. This time, instead of only giving rats the option of driving to the Froot Loop Tree, they could also make a shorter journey on foot – or paw, in this case.

Surprisingly, two of the three rats chose to take the less efficient path of turning away from the reward and running to the car to drive to their Froot Loop destination. This response suggests that the rats enjoy both the journey and the rewarding destination.

Rat lessons on enjoying the journey

We’re not the only team investigating positive emotions in animals.

Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp famously tickled rats, demonstrating their capacity for joy.

Research has also shown that desirable low-stress rat environments retune their brains’ reward circuits, such as the nucleus accumbens. When animals are housed in their favored environments, the area of the nucleus accumbens that responds to appetitive experiences expands. Alternatively, when rats are housed in stressful contexts, the fear-generating zones of their nucleus accumbens expand. It is as if the brain is a piano the environment can tune.

Neuroscientist Curt Richter also made the case for rats having hope. In a study that wouldn’t be permitted today, rats swam in glass cylinders filled with water, eventually drowning from exhaustion if they weren’t rescued. Lab rats frequently handled by humans swam for hours to days. Wild rats gave up after just a few minutes. If the wild rats were briefly rescued, however, their survival time extended dramatically, sometimes by days. It seemed that being rescued gave the rats hope and spurred them on.

The driving rats project has opened new and unexpected doors in my behavioral neuroscience research lab. While it’s vital to study negative emotions such as fear and stress, positive experiences also shape the brain in significant ways.

As animals – human or otherwise – navigate the unpredictability of life, anticipating positive experiences helps drive a persistence to keep searching for life’s rewards. In a world of immediate gratification, these rats offer insights into the neural principles guiding everyday behavior. Rather than pushing buttons for instant rewards, they remind us that planning, anticipating and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain. That’s a lesson my lab rats have taught me well.The Conversation

Kelly Lambert, Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience, University of Richmond

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Evidence from Snowball Earth found in ancient rocks on Colorado’s Pikes Peak – it’s a missing link

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theconversation.com – Liam Courtney-Davies, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Geological Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder – 2024-11-11 14:03:00

Rocks can hold clues to history dating back hundreds of millions of years.
Christine S. Siddoway

Liam Courtney-Davies, University of Colorado Boulder; Christine Siddoway, Colorado College, and Rebecca Flowers, University of Colorado Boulder

Around 700 million years ago, the Earth cooled so much that scientists believe massive ice sheets encased the entire planet like a giant snowball. This global deep freeze, known as Snowball Earth, endured for tens of millions of years.

Yet, miraculously, early life not only held on, but thrived. When the ice melted and the ground thawed, complex multicellular life emerged, eventually leading to life-forms we recognize today.

The Snowball Earth hypothesis has been largely based on evidence from sedimentary rocks exposed in areas that once were along coastlines and shallow seas, as well as climate modeling. Physical evidence that ice sheets covered the interior of continents in warm equatorial regions had eluded scientists – until now.

In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our team of geologists describes the missing link, found in an unusual pebbly sandstone encapsulated within the granite that forms Colorado’s Pikes Peak.

An illustration of an icy earth viewed from space
Earth iced over during the Cryogenian Period, but life on the planet survived.
NASA illustration

Solving a Snowball Earth mystery on a mountain

Pikes Peak, originally named Tavá Kaa-vi by the Ute people, lends its ancestral name, Tava, to these notable rocks. They are composed of solidified sand injectites, which formed in a similar manner to a medical injection when sand-rich fluid was forced into underlying rock.

A possible explanation for what created these enigmatic sandstones is the immense pressure of an overlying Snowball Earth ice sheet forcing sediment mixed with meltwater into weakened rock below.

A hand holds a rock with dark seams through it and other colors.
Dark red to purple bands of Tava sandstone dissect pink and white granite. The Tava is also cross-cut by silvery-gray veins of iron oxide.
Liam Courtney-Davies

An obstacle for testing this idea, however, has been the lack of an age for the rocks to reveal when the right geological circumstances existed for sand injection.

We found a way to solve that mystery, using veins of iron found alongside the Tava injectites, near Pikes Peak and elsewhere in Colorado.

A cliff side showing a long strip of lighter color Tava cutting through Pikes Peak Granite. The injectite here is 5 meters tall
A 5-meter-tall, almost vertical Tava dike is evident in this section of Pikes Peak granite.
Liam Courtney-Davies

Iron minerals contain very low amounts of naturally occurring radioactive elements, including uranium, which slowly decays to the element lead at a known rate. Recent advancements in laser-based radiometric dating allowed us to measure the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes in the iron oxide mineral hematite to reveal how long ago the individual crystals formed.

The iron veins appear to have formed both before and after the sand was injected into the Colorado bedrock: We found veins of hematite and quartz that both cut through Tava dikes and were crosscut by Tava dikes. That allowed us to figure out an age bracket for the sand injectites, which must have formed between 690 million and 660 million years ago.

So, what happened?

The time frame means these sandstones formed during the Cryogenian Period, from 720 million to 635 million years ago. The name is derived from “cold birth” in ancient Greek and is synonymous with climate upheaval and disruption of life on our planet – including Snowball Earth.

While the triggers for the extreme cold at that time are debated, prevailing theories involve changes in tectonic plate activity, including the release of particles into the atmosphere that reflected sunlight away from Earth. Eventually, a buildup of carbon dioxide from volcanic outgassing may have warmed the planet again.

University of Exeter professor Timothy Lenton explains why the Earth was able to freeze over.

The Tava found on Pikes Peak would have formed close to the equator within the heart of an ancient continent named Laurentia, which gradually over time and long tectonic cycles moved into its current northerly position in North America today.

The origin of Tava rocks has been debated for over 125 years, but the new technology allowed us to conclusively link them to the Cryogenian Snowball Earth period for the first time.

The scenario we envision for how the sand injection happened looks something like this:

A giant ice sheet with areas of geothermal heating at its base produced meltwater, which mixed with quartz-rich sediment below. The weight of the ice sheet created immense pressures that forced this sandy fluid into bedrock that had already been weakened over millions of years. Similar to fracking for natural gas or oil today, the pressure cracked the rocks and pushed the sandy meltwater in, eventually creating the injectites we see today.

Clues to another geologic puzzle

Not only do the new findings further cement the global Snowball Earth hypothesis, but the presence of Tava injectites within weak, fractured rocks once overridden by ice sheets provides clues about other geologic phenomena.

Time gaps in the rock record created through erosion and referred to as unconformities can be seen today across the United States, most famously at the Grand Canyon, where in places, over a billion years of time is missing. Unconformities occur when a sustained period of erosion removes and prevents newer layers of rock from forming, leaving an unconformable contact.

Unconformity in the Grand Canyon is evident here where horizontal layers of 500-million-year-old rock sit on top of a mass of 1,800-million-year-old rocks. The unconformity, or ‘time gap,’ demonstrates that years of history are missing.
Mike Norton via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Our results support that a Great Unconformity near Pikes Peak must have been formed prior to Cryogenian Snowball Earth. That’s at odds with hypotheses that attribute the formation of the Great Unconformity to large-scale erosion by Snowball Earth ice sheets themselves.

We hope the secrets of these elusive Cryogenian rocks in Colorado will lead to the discovery of further terrestrial records of Snowball Earth. Such findings can help develop a clearer picture of our planet during climate extremes and the processes that led to the habitable planet we live on today.The Conversation

Liam Courtney-Davies, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Geological Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder; Christine Siddoway, Professor of Geology, Colorado College, and Rebecca Flowers, Professor of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Missing link to Snowball Earth history emerges from some unusual rocks on Colorado’s Pikes Peak

Published

on

theconversation.com – Liam Courtney-Davies, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Geological Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder – 2024-11-11 14:03:00

Rocks can hold clues to history dating back hundreds of millions of years.
Christine S. Siddoway

Liam Courtney-Davies, University of Colorado Boulder; Christine Siddoway, Colorado College, and Rebecca Flowers, University of Colorado Boulder

Around 700 million years ago, the Earth cooled so much that scientists believe massive ice sheets encased the entire planet like a giant snowball. This global deep freeze, known as Snowball Earth, endured for tens of millions of years.

Yet, miraculously, early life not only held on, but thrived. When the ice melted and the ground thawed, complex multicellular life emerged, eventually leading to life-forms we recognize today.

The Snowball Earth hypothesis has been largely based on evidence from sedimentary rocks exposed in areas that once were along coastlines and shallow seas, as well as climate modeling. Physical evidence that ice sheets covered the interior of continents in warm equatorial regions had eluded scientists – until now.

In new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, our team of geologists describes the missing link, found in an unusual pebbly sandstone encapsulated within the granite that forms Colorado’s Pikes Peak.

An illustration of an icy earth viewed from space
Earth iced over during the Cryogenian Period, but life on the planet survived.
NASA illustration

Solving a Snowball Earth mystery on a mountain

Pikes Peak, originally named Tavá Kaa-vi by the Ute people, lends its ancestral name, Tava, to these notable rocks. They are composed of solidified sand injectites, which formed in a similar manner to a medical injection when sand-rich fluid was forced into underlying rock.

A possible explanation for what created these enigmatic sandstones is the immense pressure of an overlying Snowball Earth ice sheet forcing sediment mixed with meltwater into weakened rock below.

A hand holds a rock with dark seams through it and other colors.
Dark red to purple bands of Tava sandstone dissect pink and white granite. The Tava is also cross-cut by silvery-gray veins of iron oxide.
Liam Courtney-Davies

An obstacle for testing this idea, however, has been the lack of an age for the rocks to reveal when the right geological circumstances existed for sand injection.

We found a way to solve that mystery, using veins of iron found alongside the Tava injectites, near Pikes Peak and elsewhere in Colorado.

A cliff side showing a long strip of lighter color Tava cutting through Pikes Peak Granite. The injectite here is 5 meters tall
A 5-meter-tall, almost vertical Tava dike is evident in this section of Pikes Peak granite.
Liam Courtney-Davies

Iron minerals contain very low amounts of naturally occurring radioactive elements, including uranium, which slowly decays to the element lead at a known rate. Recent advancements in laser-based radiometric dating allowed us to measure the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes in the iron oxide mineral hematite to reveal how long ago the individual crystals formed.

The iron veins appear to have formed both before and after the sand was injected into the Colorado bedrock: We found veins of hematite and quartz that both cut through Tava dikes and were crosscut by Tava dikes. That allowed us to figure out an age bracket for the sand injectites, which must have formed between 690 million and 660 million years ago.

So, what happened?

The time frame means these sandstones formed during the Cryogenian Period, from 720 million to 635 million years ago. The name is derived from “cold birth” in ancient Greek and is synonymous with climate upheaval and disruption of life on our planet – including Snowball Earth.

While the triggers for the extreme cold at that time are debated, prevailing theories involve changes in tectonic plate activity, including the release of particles into the atmosphere that reflected sunlight away from Earth. Eventually, a buildup of carbon dioxide from volcanic outgassing may have warmed the planet again.

University of Exeter professor Timothy Lenton explains why the Earth was able to freeze over.

The Tava found on Pikes Peak would have formed close to the equator within the heart of an ancient continent named Laurentia, which gradually over time and long tectonic cycles moved into its current northerly position in North America today.

The origin of Tava rocks has been debated for over 125 years, but the new technology allowed us to conclusively link them to the Cryogenian Snowball Earth period for the first time.

The scenario we envision for how the sand injection happened looks something like this:

A giant ice sheet with areas of geothermal heating at its base produced meltwater, which mixed with quartz-rich sediment below. The weight of the ice sheet created immense pressures that forced this sandy fluid into bedrock that had already been weakened over millions of years. Similar to fracking for natural gas or oil today, the pressure cracked the rocks and pushed the sandy meltwater in, eventually creating the injectites we see today.

Clues to another geologic puzzle

Not only do the new findings further cement the global Snowball Earth hypothesis, but the presence of Tava injectites within weak, fractured rocks once overridden by ice sheets provides clues about other geologic phenomena.

Time gaps in the rock record created through erosion and referred to as unconformities can be seen today across the United States, most famously at the Grand Canyon, where in places, over a billion years of time is missing. Unconformities occur when a sustained period of erosion removes and prevents newer layers of rock from forming, leaving an unconformable contact.

Unconformity in the Grand Canyon is evident here where horizontal layers of 500-million-year-old rock sit on top of a mass of 1,800-million-year-old rocks. The unconformity, or ‘time gap,’ demonstrates that years of history are missing.
Mike Norton via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Our results support that a Great Unconformity near Pikes Peak must have been formed prior to Cryogenian Snowball Earth. That’s at odds with hypotheses that attribute the formation of the Great Unconformity to large-scale erosion by Snowball Earth ice sheets themselves.

We hope the secrets of these elusive Cryogenian rocks in Colorado will lead to the discovery of further terrestrial records of Snowball Earth. Such findings can help develop a clearer picture of our planet during climate extremes and the processes that led to the habitable planet we live on today.The Conversation

Liam Courtney-Davies, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Geological Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder; Christine Siddoway, Professor of Geology, Colorado College, and Rebecca Flowers, Professor of Geological Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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