Snowball Earth

13,879,000,000 Years Ago

In the nascent days of eternity, jejune force and form evolved from the insipid formlessness of conception, and matter blindly found its kin. So strong was this familial bond - so incestuously compelling the prospect of creation - that an excess of ninety two dephlogisticated living races came to full term in one termagant birth of immense proportions.

Elemental behavior quickly pubesced toward an inherence of repeated, promiscuous joining and separation, then frenzied rejoining as if driven by an inborn instinct scripted by natural laws…

Under similar conditions, energy and matter shall behave similarly anywhere and everywhere, and no phenomenon shall occur a mere once.

There then amassed immeasurably vast and elegant clouds composed principally of the simplest and most adulterously insouciant stable element then, as now – some fourteen billion years later: Hydrogen. These forming and expanding seas of the single proton element circulated within, amongst, and against themselves even as they swirled and eddied in the expanding Creation, carrying in their undertow their less numerous but heavier siblings in the mix.

The most subtle and fundamental quantized entity in the universe known as a ‘tise’, forever attached to each particle of matter and photon of energy like a permanent memory, accelerated the condensation of these gas oceans in on themselves, even as the space they inhabited expanded at superluminal speed, and facilitated their explosive contraction toward the formation of the first stars, galaxies, planets… and YOU.

850,000,000 Years Ago

The potato-shaped mountain of cold, primordial iron had been a mute witness to the latest 3.7 billion years of cosm...

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...s hovered at twenty degrees below zero and where winter temperatures at the poles allowed carbon dioxide to freeze into dry ice.

The “Snowball Earth” had begun.

Outside of the Ingram’s house – on one hot and humid Spring evening, late in the season in this Big Apple suburb called Nanuet – the unforcast and oppressive heat of the wilted afternoon had yet to relinquish the atmosphere from its smothering grip: Viciously humid for the human beings attempting to attend to their responsibilities; Viciously humid for the their canine and feline companions relegated to a daytime life out-of-doors; Viciously humid, too, for all of the flighted avian creatures calling home the dwindling woods and forests in this county of Rockland. Once a pleasant balance of woodland and suburban homes, nearly all of the county’s hamlets were now almost exclusively the latter.