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 ...
YUP
yup, thanks for taking the time to write that.
My guess is it was the excessive cold and limited food sources and agricultural opportunities.
I sure as heck wouldn't live there
If true, Greenland ought to be underwater by now................
The old adage “All computer models are wrong, though some are useful”, has been my guiding light in a 60-year career using computer models. This one makes me highly suspect. For starters, the verbiage says 3 meters of sea level rise, while the chart indicates one and a half meters. They also show the sea level ‘rise’ to be at the start of the Little Ice Age, rather than at the end. How could the so-called gravity effect of the accumulating ice start before the ice actually accumulated?
Color me highly skeptical. This one seems to me to be not one of the not ‘useful’ models.
Indeed. I was questioning the “logic” of the claim.
Sea levels had been rising since the end of the Younger-Dryas period 11400 years ago. The last glaciation.
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