Seven hundred million years ago, ice covered the Earth from pole to equator. The standard mechanism is ice-albedo feedback: ice reflects sunlight, reduced absorption cools the surface, more ice forms, more light reflects. A positive feedback loop that, once triggered, runs to completion.
A new climate simulation adds a second feedback that the first one creates. When seawater freezes, dissolved salts are expelled from the crystal structure. In extremely cold conditions, these concentrated brines crystallize. As the surface ice sublimates — evaporates directly from solid to vapor — the salt crystals remain, forming a bright residue on the ice surface.
This residue is more reflective than the ice beneath it. Fresh ice already has high albedo. Salt-encrusted sublimation surfaces have higher albedo still. The process that created the ice also created a surface that outperforms ice at the ice's own function — reflecting sunlight.
The salt-albedo feedback doesn't replace the ice-albedo feedback. It amplifies it. And it only exists because of it. Salt crystals don't appear on the surface until ice has already formed and begun sublimating. The second feedback is a byproduct of the first. Once activated, the simulations show that exiting the frozen state requires substantially more warming than ice-albedo alone would demand. The product of the crisis makes the crisis harder to end.
The through-claim: a process can create its own accelerant. The byproduct of freezing — precipitated salt — reflects more light than the ice that produced it. The feedback loop that drove the planet into glaciation generated, as a side effect, a new feedback loop that locked it there. The trap built its own lock from its own waste.