Wednesday, February 27, 2019

The Vikings and Global Warming

From Archaeology News Network:
After reconstructing southern Greenland's climate record over the past 3,000 years, a Northwestern University team found that it was relatively warm when the Norse lived there between 985 and 1450 C.E., compared to the previous and following centuries. 
"People have speculated that the Norse settled in Greenland during an unusually, fortuitously warm period, but there weren't any detailed local temperature reconstructions that fully confirmed that. And some recent work suggested that the opposite was true," said Northwestern's Yarrow Axford, the study's senior author. "So this has been a bit of a climate mystery." 
Now that climate mystery finally has been solved. The study published in the journal Geology. Axford is an associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. The study is a part of Northwestern Ph.D. candidate G. Everett Lasher's dissertation research, based in Axford's lab. 
To reconstruct past climate, the researchers studied lake sediment cores collected near Norse settlements outside of Narsaq in southern Greenland. Because lake sediment forms by an incremental buildup of annual layers of mud, these cores contain archives of the past. By looking through the layers, researchers can pinpoint climate clues from eons ago. (Read more.)
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1 comment:

julygirl said...

There is evidence of a warmer climate at that time based on the fact that Grapes were grown and wine making was done in the British Isles area. Upon the arrival of the 'mini ice age' agriculture changed to products that grow in cooler climates such as wheat and thus wine production changed to beer.