Deposition of this largely sedimentary succession extended from approximately 2.5 to 2.2 billion years ago (Gya), during the Siderian and Rhyacian periods of the Paleoproterozoic era.
[5][6] In 1907, Arthur Philemon Coleman first inferred a "lower Huronian ice age"[7][8] from analysis of a geological formation near Lake Huron in Ontario.
[9][10] The confusion of the terms glaciation and ice age has led to the more recent impression that the entire time period represents a single glacial event.
In North America, similar-age deposits are exposed in Michigan, the Medicine Bow Mountains, Wyoming, Chibougamau, Quebec, and central Nunavut.
Furthermore, atmospheric methane was depleted by oxygen and reduced to trace gas levels, and replaced by much less powerful greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, the latter of which was also readily precipitated out of the air at low temperatures.
This might have also caused some anaerobic archaea to begin invaginating their cell membranes into endomembranes in order to shield and protect the cytoplasmic nucleic acids, allowing endosymbiosis with aerobic eubacteria (which eventually became ATP-producing mitochondria), and this symbiogenesis contributed to the evolution of eukaryotic organisms during the Proterozoic.
[citation needed] Hypothetical runaway greenhouse state Tropical temperatures may reach poles Global climate during an ice age Earth's surface entirely or nearly frozen over