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Antarctica is the Perfect Place to Study Snowball Earth

Hundreds of millions of years ago, temperatures cooled on Earth to the point that almost the entire planet was covered in glaciers: snowball Earth. Much of the geological record is gone, but there are places in Antarctica that mimic the conditions that might have been present back then. Researchers studied meltwater ponds on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica, places where microbial mats can form and provide surprisingly diverse safe havens for multi-cellular life.

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