Refuting Creationism - How Living Organism's Survived - 700 Million Years Before 'Creation Week'

Researchers Ian Hawes of the University of Waikato and Marc Schallenberg of the University of Otago measure the physicochemical conditions of a meltwater pond.

Credit: Roger Summons

Pustular microbial mat section such as could have existend in small melt-water ponds.

When Earth iced over, early life may have sheltered in meltwater ponds | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Only by systematically ignoring geological and archaeological evidence can creationists continue to delude themselves into believing that Earth is just a few thousand years old and was perfectly created by an anthropophilic god especially for humans – its supposed “special creation.”

The evidence, however, paints a radically different picture from that childish superstition. Not only was Earth clearly not perfectly created for humans, it wasn’t perfectly created for any life form. And it is far older than creationists assert. In truth, around 600 million years ago, Earth was such a hostile place for life that it was entirely covered in ice. The polar ice sheets had extended until they met at the equator. These “Snowball Earth” conditions led to a mass extinction so severe that it remains something of a mystery how any life survived – especially complex eukaryotic cells.

Now, a multinational team of researchers led by scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has found evidence that early life could have survived in small pools of surface meltwater. They reached this conclusion after studying similar meltwater pools on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica. What they found not only showed that single-celled eukaryotes can survive in such conditions, but also revealed that the population of prokaryotes varies according to local environmental conditions

These meltwater pools act as microcosms of diverse environments and demonstrate how local factors shape the distribution of different species – exactly as predicted by the Theory of Evolution. Had the conditions been perfect as creationists insist, there could be no variation in the populations in these pools. Variation only arises because the species need to adapt to different conditions - something that would never be needed in perfectly designed conditions.

The team has just published their findings, open access, in the journal Nature Communications.

What is known about the causes, duration and eventually end of the 'Cryogenian' period in Earth's history? The Cryogenian Period, spanning roughly 720 to 635 million years ago, is one of the most extreme and fascinating intervals in Earth’s history. It forms the second period of the Neoproterozoic Era and is best known for its global-scale glaciations, commonly referred to as "Snowball Earth" events. Here's a summary of what is known about its causes, duration, and eventual end:

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Glaciations During the Cryogenian

There were at least two major glaciations during the Cryogenian:

1. Sturtian Glaciation (~720–660 million years ago)
2. Marinoan Glaciation (~650–635 million years ago)

Each is thought to have lasted millions of years and possibly resulted in ice sheets reaching equatorial regions, potentially encasing the planet in ice from pole to pole.

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Causes of the Cryogenian Glaciations

1. Continental Configurations
   • The supercontinent Rodinia was breaking apart during this time.
   • The fragmentation may have increased weathering of silicate rocks, which draws down atmospheric CO₂ – a major greenhouse gas – leading to global cooling.
   • The continents were also mostly near the equator, increasing weathering rates further and enhancing Earth's albedo (reflectivity).
2. Low Solar Output
   • The Sun was about 6% dimmer than it is today, contributing to a cooler Earth, especially vulnerable to tipping into global glaciation under the right conditions.
   
   
3. Feedback Loops
   • Once ice advanced toward the tropics, ice-albedo feedback became dominant: more ice → higher reflectivity → more cooling → more ice.
   • This could have led to a runaway effect, locking Earth into a deep freeze.

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The End of the Cryogenian

1. Volcanic CO₂ Buildup
   • While the planet was frozen, volcanic activity continued unabated.
   • Over millions of years, CO₂ accumulated in the atmosphere due to a lack of weathering (which normally removes CO₂).
   • Eventually, this greenhouse gas buildup caused a rapid global warming event that ended the glaciations.
   
   
2. Cap Carbonates
   • The end of each glaciation is marked in the geological record by “cap carbonates” – thick layers of carbonate rock deposited directly on glacial sediments.
   • These are thought to be the result of extreme atmospheric CO₂ levels causing intense weathering and chemical precipitation as the climate warmed rapidly.

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Biological Implications

• Despite the severity of the glaciations, life survived, possibly in refugia such as:
  • Meltwater ponds (like those studied in Antarctica today)
  • Hydrothermal vents
  • Ice-free oases near volcanic activity or equatorial oceans
• The aftermath of the Cryogenian may have helped set the stage for the Ediacaran biota – the first large, multicellular organisms in the fossil record.

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Current Research

Ongoing work seeks to refine:

• The exact timing and duration of the glaciations
• Whether Earth was a true “Snowball” (completely frozen) or a “Slushball” (with some open water)
• How early eukaryotic life survived and adapted

Their work is also explained in an MIT news article.

When Earth iced over, early life may have sheltered in meltwater ponds

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Modern-day analogs in Antarctica reveal ponds teeming with life similar to early multicellular organisms.

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When the Earth froze over, where did life shelter? MIT scientists say one refuge may have been pools of melted ice that dotted the planet’s icy surface.

In a study appearing today in Nature Communications, the researchers report that 635 million to 720 million years ago, during periods known as “Snowball Earth,” when much of the planet was covered in ice, some of our ancient cellular ancestors could have waited things out in meltwater ponds.

The scientists found that eukaryotes — complex cellular lifeforms that eventually evolved into the diverse multicellular life we see today — could have survived the global freeze by living in shallow pools of water. These small, watery oases may have persisted atop relatively shallow ice sheets present in equatorial regions. There, the ice surface could accumulate dark-colored dust and debris from below, which enhanced its ability to melt into pools. At temperatures hovering around 0 degrees Celsius, the resulting meltwater ponds could have served as habitable environments for certain forms of early complex life.

The team drew its conclusions based on an analysis of modern-day meltwater ponds. Today in Antarctica, small pools of melted ice can be found along the margins of ice sheets. The conditions along these polar ice sheets are similar to what likely existed along ice sheets near the equator during Snowball Earth.

The researchers analyzed samples from a variety of meltwater ponds located on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in an area that was first described by members of Robert Falcon Scott's 1903 expedition as “dirty ice.” The MIT researchers discovered clear signatures of eukaryotic life in every pond. The communities of eukaryotes varied from pond to pond, revealing a surprising diversity of life across the setting. The team also found that salinity plays a key role in the kind of life a pond can host: Ponds that were more brackish or salty had more similar eukaryotic communities, which differed from those in ponds with fresher waters.

We’ve shown that meltwater ponds are valid candidates for where early eukaryotes could have sheltered during these planet-wide glaciation events. This shows us that diversity is present and possible in these sorts of settings. It’s really a story of life’s resilience.

Fatima Husain, lead author
Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.

The study’s MIT co-authors include Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology Roger Summons and former postdoc Thomas Evans, along with Jasmin Millar of Cardiff University, Anne Jungblut at the Natural History Museum in London, and Ian Hawes of the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Polar plunge

“Snowball Earth” is the colloquial term for periods of time in Earth history during which the planet iced over. It is often used as a reference to the two consecutive, multi-million-year glaciation events which took place during the Cryogenian Period, which geologists refer to as the time between 635 and 720 million years ago. Whether the Earth was more of a hardened snowball or a softer “slushball” is still up for debate. But scientists are certain of one thing: Most of the planet was plunged into a deep freeze, with average global temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius. The question has been: How and where did life survive?

We’re interested in understanding the foundations of complex life on Earth. We see evidence for eukaryotes before and after the Cryogenian in the fossil record, but we largely lack direct evidence of where they may have lived during. The great part of this mystery is, we know life survived. We’re just trying to understand how and where.

Fatima Husain, lead author.
Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA.

There are a number of ideas for where organisms could have sheltered during Snowball Earth, including in certain patches of the open ocean (if such environments existed), in and around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and under ice sheets. In considering meltwater ponds, Husain and her colleagues pursued the hypothesis that surface ice meltwaters may also have been capable of supporting early eukaryotic life at the time.

There are many hypotheses for where life could have survived and sheltered during the Cryogenian, but we don’t have excellent analogs for all of them. Above-ice meltwater ponds occur on Earth today and are accessible, giving us the opportunity to really focus in on the eukaryotes which live in these environments.

Fatima Husain.

Small pond, big life

For their new study, the researchers analyzed samples taken from meltwater ponds in Antarctica. In 2018, Summons and colleagues from New Zealand traveled to a region of the McMurdo Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, known to host small ponds of melted ice, each just a few feet deep and a few meters wide. There, water freezes all the way to the seafloor, in the process trapping dark-colored sediments and marine organisms. Wind-driven loss of ice from the surface creates a sort of conveyer belt that brings this trapped debris to the surface over time, where it absorbs the sun’s warmth, causing ice to melt, while surrounding debris-free ice reflects incoming sunlight, resulting in the formation of shallow meltwater ponds.

The bottom of each pond is lined with mats of microbes that have built up over years to form layers of sticky cellular communities.

These mats can be a few centimeters thick, colorful, and they can be very clearly layered.

Fatima Husain.

These microbial mats are made up of cyanobacteria, prokaryotic, single-celled photosynthetic organisms that lack a cell nucleus or other organelles. While these ancient microbes are known to survive within some of the harshest environments on Earth including meltwater ponds, the researchers wanted to know whether eukaryotes — complex organisms that evolved a cell nucleus and other membrane bound organelles — could also weather similarly challenging circumstances. Answering this question would take more than a microscope, as the defining characteristics of the microscopic eukaryotes present among the microbial mats are too subtle to distinguish by eye.

To characterize the eukaryotes, the team analyzed the mats for specific lipids they make called sterols, as well as genetic components called ribosomal ribonucleic acid (rRNA), both of which can be used to identify organisms with varying degrees of specificity. These two independent sets of analyses provided complementary fingerprints for certain eukaryotic groups. As part of the team’s lipid research, they found many sterols and rRNA genes closely associated with specific types of algae, protists, and microscopic animals among the microbial mats. The researchers were able to assess the types and relative abundance of lipids and rRNA genes from pond to pond, and found the ponds hosted a surprising diversity of eukaryotic life.

No two ponds were alike. There are repeating casts of characters, but they’re present in different abundances. And we found diverse assemblages of eukaryotes from all the major groups in all the ponds studied. These eukaryotes are the descendants of the eukaryotes that survived the Snowball Earth. This really highlights that meltwater ponds during Snowball Earth could have served as above-ice oases that nurtured the eukaryotic life that enabled the diversification and proliferation of complex life — including us — later on.

Fatima Husain.

Publication:

Husain, F., Millar, J.L., Jungblut, A.D. et al.
Biosignatures of diverse eukaryotic life from a Snowball Earth analogue environment in Antarctica. Nat Commun 16, 5315 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-60713-5

Abstract
The ephemeral, supraglacial meltwater ponds of the McMurdo Ice Shelf’s undulating ice serve as analogues for refugia where eukaryotic organisms could have thrived during the Cryogenian period. The seafloor sediment and debris lined ponds support the growth of a diverse array of cyanobacterial mat communities and provide habitats for a variety of protists and meiofauna. Here, we show that these eukaryotic assemblages, assessed by steroid biomarker and 18S rRNA gene analyses, inform long-standing questions regarding the diversity of, and controls on, community composition in these environments. Sixteen photosynthetically active microbial mats from meltwater ponds, a 700-year-old relict microbial mat, and a microbial mat from the Bratina Lagoon were analysed for their sterol compositions. These sterols were subjected to simulated diagenesis via catalytic hydrogenation/hydrogenolysis affording their sterane hydrocarbon counterparts, facilitating comparisons with ancient settings. Pond salinity appeared to be a factor influencing the sterol distributions observed. Analyses of 18S rRNA gene sequences conducted on the modern mats independently confirm that the ponds host diverse eukaryotes, including many types of microalgae, protists, and an array of unclassifiable organisms. Our findings support the hypothesis that supraglacial meltwater ponds like those of the McMurdo ice are strong candidates for refugia that sheltered complex life during Snowball Earth episodes.

Introduction
The global prevalence of late Neoproterozoic glacial deposits at equatorial latitudes, together with a range of accompanying features such as the distinctive cap dolostones and unusual iron formations, led to the articulation of the Snowball Earth hypothesis^1,2,3. Following extensive research in high precision geochronology, stratigraphy, palaeontology, geochemistry, and modelling, the Cryogenian period was established; the 720 to 635 million year ago interval is marked by two long-lived Sturtian and Marinoan glacial epochs with a warmer interglacial^4,5,6. The extreme environmental transformation that took place during the Cryogenian has been cited as an evolutionary driver for the Ediacaran expansion of multicellular life^7,8. The idea of a hard Snowball, a scenario in which the entire planet was encapsulated in ice so thick that sub-ice photosynthesis in the marine realm was prevented, has faced numerous critiques, with alternative proposals such as a soft Snowball, slushball⁹, or thin ice scenarios¹⁰ that would have been less disruptive to the marine carbon cycle. Whatever the case, it is instructive to consider the viability of eukaryotic refugia under these scenarios, specifically supraglacial settings, where aquatic photosynthesis could have been productive in support of ecosystems where complex life persisted and evolved^11,12.

Supraglacial meltwater ponds, analogous to those presently scattered atop the McMurdo Ice Shelf, would have been prevalent along continental margins and supported microbial communities during the Cryogenian^11,12,13. In turn, these communities would have sheltered antecedents for the succeeding Ediacaran Period’s diversification and proliferation of complex eukaryotic life, including the first animals^5,14. Still, outstanding questions remain regarding the persistence and distribution of such eukaryotic refugia, as well as of the types of organisms that may have existed within them. The scarcity of fossil records of Cryogenian ecosystems, coupled with the low likelihood that evidence of life from supraglacial habitats could be preserved in the geologic record, highlights the value of detailed characterisations of contemporary analogues. While acknowledging that Cryogenian microbiota would have been different from those of today, it has long been recognised that the ecological and metabolic structuring of modern microbial mats serve as useful models for those of Earth’s past¹⁵.

Detailed characterisations of the eukaryotic communities of Antarctic supraglacial ecosystems are limited and, until recently, were primarily constructed through microscopy^{13,16,17,18,19}. Such visual approaches necessitate the identification of distinct morphological characters—a prospect complicated by morphotype similarities for many eukaryotic microbial groups, including metazoa and SAR¹⁹. Early, microscopy-based identifications of diatoms, chlorophytes, chrysophytes, and metazoa have been confirmed and expanded upon via contemporary applications of environmental 18S rRNA gene sequencing techniques^19,20,21. However, methodological challenges, such as the optimisation of primers and amplification techniques for psychrophiles, still limit the understanding of microbial eukaryotic diversity in Antarctica²². Some of these limitations may be addressed by the identification of sterols, the membrane-stabilising and cell-signalling lipid biomarkers of eukaryotes, which can be closely associated with distinct eukaryotic groups^23,24. The detection of sterols and their chemically reduced counterparts, the stanols and steranes, in ancient and modern sedimentary settings enables an independent reconstruction of the eukaryotic community. Though sterol biosynthetic pathways may be shared across many eukaryotic taxa, broad classifications may be assigned, and steroid biomarker compositions may be compared across different environmental settings and time.

The McMurdo Ice Shelf’s undulating ice affords a readily accessible Cryogenian analogue environment with the opportunity to examine microbial eukaryotic distributions across a variety of supraglacial settings, including physicochemically-diverse meltwater ponds (Fig. 1 and Table 1) supporting photosynthetically active microbial communities (Fig. 2A), former pond basins that are now elevated and have desiccated (Fig. 2B), and an active meltwater lagoon system. This environment also hosts an array of marine debris on the ice surface (Fig. 2C, D). To characterise signatures of eukaryotic life across the undulating ice, steroid biomarker distributions were examined in 16 microbial mats collected from the landscape and compared with 18S rRNA gene characterisations of the mat communities. Sterols derived from the microbial mats were further subjected to simulated diagenesis via catalytic hydrogenation/hydrogenolysis to generate sterane assemblages that can be compared to those preserved in the fossil record. The results of these analyses support the notion that diverse communities of protists and meiofauna persist within supraglacial meltwater ponds, and that the meltwater refugia on the McMurdo Ice Shelf are plausible candidates for settings which harboured complex ecosystems during the Cryogenian Period.

Fig. 1: Study area and sample location.

A The geographical location of the study vicinity and Bratina Island. B Detailed depiction of the meltwater ponds off the coast of Bratina Island based on satellite imagery. Sites included in this study are outlined in black and coloured in blue. Not shown: Bratina Lagoon, located approximately 1 km west of the area depicted.

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Fig. 2: Life around the Bratina meltwater pond landscape.

A Pustular microbial mat section collected from New Pond. B A mound of relict microbial mats. C A fossil sponge on the landscape surface atop pinnacle ice. D A fossil bryozoan. All photos were captured by RES in January 2018.

Husain, F., Millar, J.L., Jungblut, A.D. et al.
Biosignatures of diverse eukaryotic life from a Snowball Earth analogue environment in Antarctica. Nat Commun 16, 5315 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-60713-5

Copyright: © 2025 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

Like so many scientific papers in biology, archaeology, and geology, this one presents creationists with facts that are utterly irreconcilable with their beliefs. A hostile Earth environment in which living organisms had only a tenuous hold – and were still subject to the pressures of natural selection – flatly contradicts the myth of a perfectly created world designed for humans. And it all took place during the vast stretch of pre-'Creation Week' Earth history, a period that comprises 99.9975% of the planet's timeline.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of creationism is its sheer ability to cling on – like a microbe on ‘Snowball Earth’ – against all odds and in the face of a relentlessly hostile environment made up of scientific facts. This stubborn persistence might almost inspire admiration, were it not so reliant on dishonesty and intellectual bankruptcy. Worse still, creationists knowingly distort and misrepresent science to attract the gullible and scientifically illiterate – often, though not exclusively, the young – into what amounts to a far-right political cult. Cloaked in the illusion of fighting a righteous battle against the supposed evils of science, their agenda is profoundly anti-scientific and ideologically driven.

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