The ice-albedo feedback on rapidly-rotating terrestrial planets in the habitable zone can lead to abrupt transitions
(bifurcations) between a warm and a snowball (ice-covered) state, bistability between these states, and hysteresis in planetary climate.
This is important for planetary habitability because snowball events may trigger rises in the complexity of life, but could also endanger
complex life that already exists. This raises the question of how the Snowball Bifurcation might work on tidally influenced planets in the
habitable zone orbiting M and K dwarf stars. We investigate this question using analytical theory, an ocean-atmosphere global climate
model, and an intermediate complexity global climate model coupled to an active carbon cycle. We find
that planets locked in a 1:1 synchronous rotation state are likely to experience a smooth transition to global glaciation rather than a
bifurcation. This is important because it means that tidally locked planets with an active silicate-weathering feedback loop should not
tend to stay in the snowball state (they would just pop out of it if they ever entered it because weathering would go to near zero while
CO2 outgassing would continue).
