Evidence of Drought Provides Clues to a Viking Mystery
https://eos.org/articles/evidence-of-drought-provides-clues-to-a-viking-mystery
Excerpt: ...Why, after more than 450 years, did a colony of medieval Norse farmers disappear from their remote Greenland settlement? In attempting to uncover what may have happened, researchers have returned again and again to climate—and to a seemingly obvious scenario. Having turned up on the island during the centuries-long Medieval Warm Period, the settlers were then gradually ushered out by the arrival of the Little Ice Age in the 14th century. But a new study has found that drought, not plunging temperatures, may have pushed an already fragile community to its breaking point. ...Around 985 CE, at the height of the Viking era, a group led by exiled explorer Erik the Red sailed west from Iceland and established the first European settlement on Greenland. The Norse farmed the land and hunted walrus for the ivory trade. ...Though they inhabited Greenland concurrently with Indigenous Dorset and Thule populations, archaeological findings show that the Norse never adopted effective Indigenous sea ice hunting practices or tools. Other evidence indicates conflict between the two populations. According to radiocarbon dating, by 1450, the Norse settlers were gone. The Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures, began around 1300 and affected different parts of the globe at different times until the mid-19th century. ...researchers have tended to extrapolate Little Ice Age climate effects in western Europe and Iceland and, perhaps erroneously, relate them to the fate of the Norse in North America. ...In looking at both temperature and hydroclimate, the researchers made two surprise findings. “We were expecting to see this dramatic temperature drop at the end of the Norse settlement period, if temperature was indeed the main factor that caused them to leave,” Castañeda said. Instead, the leaf waxes revealed that Greenland had experienced a relatively wet period just before the settlers arrived, and conditions became drier over time, peaking in the century after the Norse abandoned the site. According to study authors, this long-term drying trend would have decreased summer grass yields, a critical source of winter fodder for livestock.…