Roughly a thousand years ago, Viking people set up camp on the southern tip of Greenland. For centuries, these settlers thrived in the previously lifeless mass of land that experienced a series of cold winters. Without sun for many months, the island became punishing for the small Norse population.
The Vikings then disappeared sometime in the 15th century, leaving several clues of the culture they brought and their lifestyles. After they went, the virgin island of southern Greenland became full of ruins, bones, and many baffling concepts that led toward the downfall of the remote Nordic society.
Little Ice Age Affected Viking Settlers in Greenland
A statue of the Viking legend Leiv Eriksson (R) and the tower of the landmark Hallgrim church are silhouetted, 13 May 2002 in Reykjavik, the capital of the North Atlantic island of Iceland. Leif Eriksson is believed to be the first to discover America sailing from the neighboring island Greenland to the North American coast.
The Little Ice Age is one of the events that experts suspect as the reason behind the mysterious vanishing of the first settlers of Greenland. This event brought a short period of global cooling that parallels the time when the Norse population was estimated to have disappeared.
The event was speculated to have associations with the factors that drove away from the Greenlandic Norse from 'Eastern Settlement' at the height of 2,000 years of Viking history.
Brown University Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences expert Boyan Zhao led the study on the investigation of the Viking's disappearance in Greenland. The study, supported by Zhao's colleagues, utilized the data collected from nearby regions of the Eastern Settlements.
Among the information, they focused on are the climate and temperature records that occurred during ancient times. Previous studies of the Little Ice Age mostly gathered the corresponding data from high-altitude places located hundreds of miles north of the Viking habitats.
On the other hand, Zhao's team extracted the hydroclimate data and temperature of the century just from a nearby farm believed to be managed before by Norse people.
Zhao explained in a report by Vice that the goal of the research is to answer unsolved questions revolving around the vanishing of Greenlandic Norse.
Taking the evidence from the climate change perspective, the expert said that there is not much to be collected from the region. This pushed them to revisit the ghost society to uncover updated details that previous studies might have missed.
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Drying Trend Damaged Agriculture of Eastern SEttlement
In the Eastern Settlements, Zhao's team spent three years observing. They analyzed the sediments scattered across the region's Lake 578. It is located at the nearby Norse farm and about 6 miles from the Qassiarsuk (Brattahlíð) settlement, which served as the place of rich Nordic culture and communities led by the famous Erik the Red.
The lake served as the foundation of life in the place, all from sustenance and farming purposes.
The results extracted from the hydration and temperature during the Medieval Viking period, spanning 2,000 years, suggest that the Eastern Settlement was not likely impacted by the Little Ice Age's cooling.
There was instead a drying trend observed in the island, which might have put the Viking farmers and other associated workers in a tight situation. The pressure possibly required the Norse settlers to get out of the once-flourishing territory and move on to a different life outside southern Greenland.
The study was published in the journal ScienceAdvances, titled "Prolonged drying trend coincident with the demise of Norse settlement in southern Greenland."
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