After the long environmental stability/stagnation during the Boring Billion, the Sturtian glaciation began at the beginning of Cryogenian, freezing the entire planet in a state of severe icehouse climate known as a snowball Earth.

There is controversy over whether these glaciations indeed covered the entire planet, or whether a band of open sea survived near the equator (i.e. "slushball Earth"), but the extreme climates with massive expanse of ice sheets blocking off sunlight would nevertheless have significantly hindered primary production in the shallow seas and caused major mass extinctions and biosphere turnovers.

For instance, the time scale of the Cambrian Period is not reckoned by rock younger than a given age (538.8 million years), but by the appearance of the worldwide Treptichnus pedum diagnostic trace fossil assemblages, which can be recognized in the field without extensive lab testing.

[12] The deposits of glacial tillite also occur in places that were at low latitudes during the Cryogenian, a phenomenon which led to the hypothesis of deeply frozen planetary oceans called "Snowball Earth".

[13] Between the Sturtian and Marinoan glaciations was a so-called "Cryogenian interglacial period" marked by relatively warm climate and anoxic oceans,[14] along with marine transgression.

The break up along the margins of Laurentia at about 750 Ma occurs at about the same time as the deposition of the Rapitan Group in North America, contemporaneously with the Sturtian in Australia.

A similar period of rifting at about 650 Ma occurred with the deposition of the Ice Brook Formation in North America, contemporaneously with the Marinoan in Australia.