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arXiv · 2611.00357

The role of salinity in Snowball Earth: A simplified coupled atmosphere--ocean--ice model

Sounav Sengupta·Francisco E. Spaulding-Astudillo·Dorian S. Abbot·Eli Tziperman·Yosef Ashkenazy
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Abstract

The Neoproterozoic Snowball Earth events represent among the most extreme climate states in Earth's history, with ice covering all or nearly all of the ocean. Despite its control on the seawater freezing point and on the partitioning of water between the ocean and ice, salinity has not been well-represented in Snowball Earth models---typically prescribed, simplified, or ignored. Sea-glacier dynamics under open-ocean conditions have similarly lacked adequate treatment. We extend the one-dimensional coupled atmosphere-ocean-ice model of Pollard and Kasting (2005, J. Geophys. Res. Oceans 110, C07010) by adding prognostic latitudinal salinity dynamics, global ocean mass conservation and salt conservation, and a revised sea-glacier momentum equation, along with a greenhouse-gas term allowing transitions between full-snowball and partially open-ocean states. The model produces two equilibrium states exhibiting strong hysteresis under varying greenhouse forcing. Higher initial ocean salinity systematically lowers the CO$_2$ thresholds for both the onset and the termination of glaciation, reflecting freezing-point depression and coupled dynamics among salinity, ocean volume, and marine ice thickness. Under full glaciation, the shrinking ocean becomes hypersaline, feeding back on thermal structure and equilibrium ice thickness. Across a 72-case factorial ensemble spanning Neoproterozoic-relevant ranges, a marginal-effect analysis shows that only ice albedo shifts the thresholds more than initial salinity (69.1\% and 80.5\% versus 21.3\% and 9.7\% for initiation and deglaciation), followed by the solar constant (8.9\% and 5.6\%) and geothermal heat flux (0.6\% and 4.2\%). Salinity should therefore be treated as an active variable in studies of Snowball thresholds.

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Sounav Sengupta, Francisco E. Spaulding-Astudillo, Dorian S. Abbot, Eli Tziperman, Yosef Ashkenazy. 2026-10-30. The role of salinity in Snowball Earth: A simplified coupled atmosphere--ocean--ice model. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00357

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