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Crispin in Waterloo says:
Building on Steven and Vuc:
Solar salt water ponds were develop in the early 80′s by some Israelis, looking at natural formations at hot springs, I believe. The idea is that if you have increasing salinity with depth (usually in steps) you can maintain at the bottom a much hotter body of water than at the top, somewhat contradicting the axiom that hot water rises. By putting these stratified salty layers into a pond with the bottom painted black, solar heat warms the lowest layer, to quite high temperatures like 60 C.
The process of placing salty water from the Atlantic under the cooler water above, with different quantities of water for both, can lead to unexpected warmth trapped at depth.
Disturbing the carefully balanced layers could cause what can be termed disruptive mixing which allows the structure to progressively collapse across a whole region. The result would be a sudden (faster than usual) melting of ice from the untrapping of the heat, followed by a lower than average temperature throughout the water column (because the heat is lost more efficiently from the warmer surface).
To have a 1-2 degree difference over sugh a depth would be easy if the water is slightly saltier (denser). That heat is not collected locally of course, it is imported.
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Philip Bradley says:
Not really surprising. Sea ice is an insulator. The Earth has a net heat loss from the Arctic. Increase the sea ice and less heat is lost.
This confirms that increased snowfall and snow accumulation on land causes the glacial phases of ice ages. The metric to watch is NH winter snowfall, which has increased about 20% over the last decade.