The Vikings are remembered as fierce fighters, however even these mighty warriors have been no match for local weather change. Scientists just lately discovered that ice sheet progress and sea stage rise led to huge coastal flooding that inundated Norse farms and finally drove the Vikings out of Greenland within the fifteenth century.
The Vikings first established a foothold in southern Greenland round A.D. 985 with the arrival of Erik Thorvaldsson, also called “Erik the Pink,” a Norwegian-born explorer who sailed to Greenland after being exiled from Iceland. Different Viking settlers quickly adopted, forming communities in Eystribyggð (Jap Settlement) and Vestribyggð (Western Settlement) that thrived for hundreds of years. (On the time of the Vikings’ arrival, Greenland was already inhabited by folks of the Dorset Tradition, an Indigenous group that preceded the arrival of the Inuit folks within the Arctic, based on the College of California Riverside).
Across the fifteenth century, indicators of Norse habitation within the area vanished from the archaeological report. Researchers beforehand steered that elements corresponding to local weather change and financial shifts possible led the Vikings to desert Greenland. Now, new findings present that rising seas performed a key position, by submerging miles of shoreline, based on information offered Wednesday (Dec. 15) on the annual convention of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held this week in New Orleans and on-line.
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Between the 14th and nineteenth centuries, Europe and North America skilled a interval of considerably cooler temperatures, referred to as the Little Ice Age. Below these chilly situations, the Greenland Ice Sheet — an enormous blanket of ice overlaying most of Greenland — would have change into even greater, Marisa Julia Borreggine, a doctoral candidate within the Division of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard College, stated in a presentation on the AGU convention.
Because the ice sheet superior, its growing heaviness weighed down the substrate beneath, making coastal areas extra susceptible to flooding, Borreggine stated. On the identical time, the elevated gravitational attraction between the increasing ice sheet and enormous plenty of sea ice pushed extra seawater over Greenland’s coast. These two processes may have pushed widespread flooding alongside the shoreline — “precisely the place the Vikings have been settled,” Borreggine stated.
The scientists examined their speculation by modeling estimated ice progress in southwestern Greenland over the 400-year interval of Norse occupation and including these calculations to a mannequin displaying sea stage rise throughout that point. Then, they analyzed maps of identified Viking websites to see how their findings lined up with archaeological proof marking the top of a Viking presence in Greenland.
Their fashions confirmed that from about 1000 to 1400, rising seas round Greenland would have flooded Viking settlements by as a lot as 16 toes (5 meters), affecting about 54 sq. miles (140 sq. kilometers) of coastal land, Borreggine stated. This flooding would have submerged land that the Vikings used for farming and as grazing pastures for his or her cattle, based on the fashions.
Nevertheless, sea stage rise was most likely not the one cause the Vikings left Greenland. Different sorts of challenges could cause even long-standing communities to break down, and an ideal storm of exterior pressures — corresponding to local weather change, social unrest and useful resource depletion — could have spurred the Vikings to desert their settlements for good, Borreggine stated.
“A mixture of local weather and environmental change, the shifting useful resource panorama, the flux of provide and demand of unique merchandise for the overseas market, and interactions with Inuit within the North all may have contributed to this out-migration,” she stated. “Seemingly a mix of those elements led to the Norse migration out of Greenland and additional west.”
Initially revealed on Reside Science.