Posted on 04/23/2023 6:28:10 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Vikings occupied Greenland from roughly 985 to 1450, farming and building communities before abandoning their settlements and mysteriously vanishing. Why they disappeared has long been a puzzle, but a new paper from the Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) determines that one factor—rising sea level—likely played a major role...
The departure of these Viking settlers coincided with the beginning of the period known as the Little Ice Age, which had a particular impact on the North Atlantic. But while cooling and freezing might seem likely to lower sea levels, a variety of factors combined to have the opposite effect in Greenland.
With the waters of the North Atlantic "contributing to that new ice volume, intuition might suggest that sea level should go down," Borreggine noted. However, a closer look at previously published geomorphological and paleoclimate data and the researchers' modeling of ice-sheet growth suggested that the opposite occurred in Greenland, focusing on the Vikings' Eastern Settlement. "What we study in our group is glacial isostatic adjustment, a process that leads to changes in the gravitational field, the rotation axis, and crustal deformation as the ice grows or melts," said Borreggine...
What the researchers found was striking: Not only were sea levels drawn up by gravity, other factors—including the subsidence of Greenland's land mass—made the settlement more prone to flooding.
Focusing on the period of Viking habitation from 1000 to 1450, "There's already a background trend of sea-level rise upon Viking arrival in the Eastern Settlement," they said. "It's been rising for a few thousand years." But there's also a local effect: "Crustal subsidence, or the sinking of land and the gravitational pull of water toward the growing ice sheet."
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
BS, cold is what drove the vikings from Greenland. Little ice age started around 1400 and it got real cold.
*Melting glaciers made the land well watered and green,*
Why do you think it’s called Greenland?
I wish Trump couda’ bought it. He knows a thing or 2 about real estate.
The weather, plus running out of fuel. Real estate agents hyped a place that disagreed with buyers who managed to view the property. Women. Rumors. News from home. Signs. Islamic wars required warriors back home.
Yes the Plymouth Rock was moved but it still makes a grand point (and meme) about what a farce anthropomorphic climate change is all about.
Sea levels had risen in Greenland but not in Europe? In 1066, William the Conqueror had to wait to cross the English channel due to unfavorable winds. I’d say they left because it was cold and no food.
But hey, I’m no expert.
Daggonit you beat me to it.
I ran across a book by a lady who did a thorough on the Greenlanders. There are quite details in the Catholic Church about these people. She seem to conclude that the young men were either recruited or kidnapped by the Portuguese sea farriers who were quite active in the north Atlantic during the time of the population decline. With out the males there was no sustaining of the limited population.
I don’t have the name of the book handy, but will look for it.
Mind boggling crap!
Sea level is bound to change, via natural causes, so, no, it doesn’t. And the fact that the rock has been moved, and returned to somewhere near where it used to be (because there was no living memory of where that was) and didn’t just remain on an eroding seashore, in exactly the same spot, means, no, it doesn’t.
Sea level rose in Britain as well. England had large ports on estuaries that no longer reach so far inland.
The western settlement was well north, and it was abandoned well before the eastern (main) settlement on Greenland. When they got there, the climate was warmer, and the sudden cold snap in the north was initiated with a series of cold rainy springs in Europe, the first of which destroyed a lot of the local seed base, which farmers over the generations had grown used to planting earlier than it was feasible to do after the Little Ice Age and mostly up to the present day. In Scandinavia the ruins of “dark age” farmsteads are found at higher altitudes and/or higher latitudes than are viable today.
During the earlier warming, the north enjoyed an expanding food supply and population, which led — thanks to a still-limited supply of arable land, and long familiarity with the sea — to large groups of young men going On the Vike. They spread into the British Isles to such an extent that us moderns with British Isles ancestry find a nice chunk of it is Scandinavian.
I recall a show where they thought (with some evidence) that the Viking’s crops (they were primarily farmers) were going bad due to the Little Ice Age.
They then surmised that they could not (would not?) make the change to living the native lifestyle of hunting seals and stuff because the Vikings were Christian, and would not participate in the native’s pagon rituals prior to each hunt.
So, they left (or died) because they were Christian farmers I guess. And served them right no doubt!
Years ago there was panic due to lowering sea levels in the Puget Sound area.
Until someone figured out that the measurements (before GPS) really showed that it was the survey monument on the land that was rising due to the rebound!
tx
“Oh Thor, the sea is rising. What shall we do?”
“Move across the wagon track.”
“No, that sounds impossible. Let’s go back to Norway. It could have fixed itself by now.”
“You go back. I have many new relatives to entertain. They are going to show us the hatchet dance tonight. I hear it is to die for.”
In other words, the Viking settlements were causing Greenland to start tipping over, so they left?
-PJ
Vikings were nonpareil wanderers, sea farers and explorers by nature. Restless and always on the move looking for new lands and people to dominate. I believe they left Greenland because it was getting colder and not rising seas...they could have just moved further inland but instead they moved on to New Foundland.
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