Precambrian paleoclimate: fragments of a mosaic (review)

The article provides a brief overview of the ideas about the Precambrian climate, present both in fundamental monographs and university textbooks published from the mid-1960s to the present day, and in numerous articles published in foreign and domestic peer-reviewed journals. The existence of two paradigms (hot and temperate Archean) is shown, based on approximately the same set of isotope-geochemical data, but proceeding from different ideas about the evolution of the isotopic composition of seawater in the deep geological past and different understanding of the processes of transformation/preservation of the “primary signal” in cherts, carbonate and phosphate minerals and other information carriers. It is noted that data on paleotemperatures and other paleoclimate parameters for the Late Precambrian are still significantly less than for the Early Precambrian, and this situation needs to be corrected.