Norse Settlers Adapted To Cold Conditions
Hvalsey Church (Danish: Hvalsø Kirke) was a church in the abandoned Greenlandic Norse settlement of Hvalsey (now modern-day Qaqortoq). The best preserved Norse ruins in Greenland, the Church was also the location of the last written record of the Greenlandic Norse, a wedding in September 1408.
A new comprehensive Danish research project has debunked the myth that Norse settlers were forced to abandon Greenland because of the adverse climate conditions. The research by Christian Koch Madsen, a PhD student at the National Museum of Denmark, showed that the Norsemen actually stayed on the island for as much as 200 years longer, despite living in a hostile environment that continued to get colder.
“The stories we’ve heard until now – about the Vikings leaving because the climate worsened – are simply not correct,”
Koch told the science website Videnskab.dk.
“They actually stayed there a long time and were far better at acclimatising that we previously believed.”
–Christian Wenande, The Copenhagen Post, 16 March 2015
h/t to The GWPF
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
So they DID leave because of the cold, they just waited 200yrs (+-) to do it?
Is that the mythbuster here?
My guess is the same will apply for some CAGW folks. Some will hang on for another 200yrs(+-).
Agreed. We do still have flat earthers.
Oh come on, we all know that the only reason that they stayed so long during adverse conditions was the local MET office continually berating them about the increase in temperature that was in the pipe line due to AGW!
You’ll see it’ll be 4.5C warmer in a hundred years!
Huh, how many times have I heard that old chestnut
LOL, by jove, I think you’re right!
Dang! That sure looks like a cold and lonely place to eek out a meager existence for a family….
Tough and hardy folks, Indeed!
Ahhh, jingoistic, history-modifying, science-like stuff. You have to love it.
Jingoistic?? Better than being a poor dead soul.
The Vikings did not leave Greenland because of the cold but they left Greenland because it got colder and then some more
I imagine that conditions worsened imperceptibly to the point where their traditional growing, gathering and hunting and fishing methods, changed utterly. Then the conditions were such that the population could not grow due to the hardship and the amount of effort required. In a matter of a couple of generations of poor conditions one could imagine how they simply no longer were there. Or they simply morphed into the Inuit, hunting and fishing and living like nomads.
Great article in the Copenhagen Post.
I have never commented before – just a lurker. I was stationed on the USCGC Westwind from 1976 to late 1977. I made two trips on this vessel to the Arctic in the summer of 1976 and again in 1977. In 1977 our ship was invited to the Danish naval base of Gronedal. As you approach the dock at Gronedal, you can see remnants of stone fences on the valley sides (overgrown with lichens & moss). They clearly marked out pastures.
When I asked one of the Danish officers at a dinner, what the fences were for, he told me that Norsemen had lived and farmed there hundreds of years prior. The fences still stand on the permafrost. The only reason to have fences is to contain livestock – which have to eat something other than moss. Therefore, it had to have been much warmer when the Norsemen lived there (strictly speaking a Viking was a raider – settlers would have been either Norwegian, Swedish, or Danish).
It was also in August of 1977 that the Soviet icebreaker Arktika sailed from Murmansk over the North pole. They sailed at an average speed of 12 knots, which means mostly in open water (this was our preferred method of travel, as it was much faster to go a mile out of the way in open water than try to break through 24 foot thick ice for 200 yards). How often has there been open water of this magnitude since?
Well, Cal Weyers! #(:))
What a fine comment — rich with helpful, rationally insightful, information (with eyewitness testimony to boot). Glad you finally spoke up. I hope many others read your worthwhile comment.
How long have you been silently lurking? If for long, I highly admire your self-restraint. As you can see, I tend to talk a lot… .
Keep on posting!
Janice
Don’t the Danes have records and articles from the 1600s to go by. 1608 wasn’t that long ago that they didn’t have written language. What were they saying back home about the folks in Greenlend?
They thought they might still be there, but they didn’t know. There was a great effort in 1610-1620 to collect all available information about Greenland that was available on Iceland, but nothing later than 1408 was found.
One might enjoy reading “Cod” and “Salt”.
Cod talks about the fishing boats coming over from Europe to fish cod in the canadian maritimes, primarily off the coast of Labrador and Newfoundland. You had to be able to both CATCH fish, and more importantly, PRESERVE fish in order to make it back home and get paid.
To preserve the fish you had to be able to dry them. And to dry them you needed a suitable piece of land.
It had to have just the right breezes to dry the fish without them getting moldy or going off.
Areas along the coast of Newfoundland were much prized for this essential activity, and to ensure that a captain had access to his prime drying grounds, a few crewmembers were chosen to stay behind for the winter to protect the claim.
How’d ya like to pull THAT short straw? 😉
Just a few from:
http://www.quotegarden.com/weather.html
The trouble with weather forecasting is that it’s right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it. ~Patrick Young
The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found? ~J.B. Priestley
My favorite weather is bird-chirping weather. ~Terri Guillemets
So sweet (and witty), U.K.. Thanks for sharing.
Umm, that wasn’t sharing, it was venting.
So, if it came out as sweet and witty I apologize.
Sorry, U.K., but you were SWEET. Bwah, ha, ha, ha, haaaaaaaa!
(don’t worry, your reputation as a curmudgeon-with-a-kind-heart-that-he-only-reveals-rarely is intact)
Even if it were true, how do think that works out against the head choppers ?
Religion gone wild.
If it wasn’t for the women and kids, the whole area would be melted sand.
They know that.
yeah, “religion of peace” mm, hm.
Say, U.K.? Did you accidentally post that comment on the wrong thread?
Take care.
You saying a shotgun and a varmint rifle might not be enough ?
Couple of Glocks might help.
Three dogs tend to get their attention, making for an easy target.
Now I need dogs.
Just playing with you, Janice.
You take care too 🙂
(It is just the world as I see it, I’m not gonna takin’ alive just to be beheaded later).
Wrong thread ?, then never mind I guess.
Best book on the subject I’ve read is The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, ca. A.D. 1000-1500 by Kirsten Seaver.
This is terrifying. Anyone know at what CO2 level the hordes of Vikings will return to Greenland?
Hey! I — don’t — know, but, I found out where the Vikings ended up!!! In show biz! (apparently they went to Great Britain first (where they learnt English:) … didn’t like the climate… went to Hollywood instead).
“Ven – tchacah” (that’s what I thought they were saying for awhile, lol) ad
youtube
And they showed up in a Monty Python sketch before that:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE?feature=player_detailpage&w=640&h=360%5D
Thank you, Mike M! I needed a laugh. That explains the British accent in the Ven-tchacah ads!!
Heh. So, SPAM (or… spahced ‘am — see, they were cockneys, ya know) did ’em in, eh? lololololol
Don’t spell out sp@m… or you will be sorry. 🙁
When they can also debunk the archeology showing cattle farming during the MWP which disappears in the LIA then the global doom mongers will have something to get excited about. As it stands, they still look silly.
Well, the irony is that the Greenland and Iceland Settlers adapted to the warm period during which they settled and when it cooled the Greenland settlers apparently may have adapted and persisted.
Adapt to warm and adapt to cold; adaption is human applied reasoning in action.
John
interesting report on Greenland, Russia, glaciers around the world, sea level rise….. , from 1951-
” What effect is this having? Russia already has good cause to be thankful for that increase of one quarter of one per cent Navigation conditions along her northern coasts have improved considerably since the turn of the century. In 1910 most of the sea lanes were open for only three months. Now they are open eight months each year”
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/71392865?searchTerm=glaciers%20melting&searchLimits=
The research by the PhD student seems to be fine. The problem is the way the news media sensationalised and mangled it in the service of a political narrative. Look no further than the misleading heading which completely misrepresents what the student actually did.
Someone needs to put the question to the news media. Since when did it become your job to misrepresent events in service of a political narrative?
Thanks, Anthony. Good post.
Norse Settlers Adapted To Cold Conditions, good for them, but it got even colder.
Cold is bad for your health.
The Vikings adapted to a changing climate. Apparently, we’re on the abyss of extinction.
Some people are just stubborn….
Danish Researchers Debunk Greenland Climate Myth
“They [Vikings] actually stayed there [Greenland] a long time and were far better at acclimatising that we previously believed.”
Acclimatizing to Greenland meant that after about 1400 A.D. the inhabitants had to live by hunting and fishing because they could no longer harvest enough food as crops. You cannot debunk the history of European settlement in Greenland by showing that a few stragglers held on for a long time by adopting the Inuit lifestyle.
We in Canada resisted adapting to the climate right up to the 20th century. But sixty years ago, kids in Saskatchewan were using (Indian) snowshoes to get to school. In southern Canada We were using parkas by the 1940’s. During the cold interval between about 1960 and 1975 Canadians in southern Canada adopted Inuit boots (mukluks).
But it was not the parkas and mukluks and snowshoes that allowed the population of Canda to reach 30 million. Early on the settlers were able to plant and harvest crops to feed themselves.
The prehistory of northern peoples is complex precisely because climate has changed naturally on the scale of centuries. My First Nations ancestors (Mohawk and Algonquin) lived in Quebec at the time of the British conquest of Canada. Their people had a long history of migration north to south (to the USA) and back again in response to climate change.
The Iroquois in Ontario raised food in their gardens based on the same plants grown by their people on the other side of the modern border, plants that originated from much further south. The Iroquois brought those plants with them when they migrated north.
Nowadays when Canadians move south, they tend not to come back, which is why Canada imports around a quarter million immigrants per year. How much of this modern movement south –dating back to before 1900– is because of climate, we don’t know.
The economic pull is very great because: recessions hit Canada harder than the US, so that Canadian unemployment acts like a pump, sending a flow of job-seekers south.
The research is not new…
http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2012/2012.11/greenland_norse_gorged_on_seals/
I think that the point that Christian Madsen was trying to make was that the Norse populations was able to adapt to the change in climate, becoming seal hunters and fisherman rather than farmers.
However the economy reverted to subsistence levels with young women less enamoured with the impoverishment than the men and choosing to leave for areas where their prospects were better.
You can see this happening in rural areas all across eastern Europe at the moment. The girls see advertisements for homes with great bathrooms on television and contrast it with their own situation..bathing in a plastic bowl outside by the chicken coop. Not fun in winter. It’s a no-brainer ; they leave. One of eastern Europe’s main exports at the moment is women. The men finally realise that all the young women have gone and they eventually leave as well.
The same thing probably happened in Greenland.
The Norse were able to adapt to a Greenlandic [Inuit] diet but the girls didn’t like it.
As I recall when I was in high school, we had to read one of Longfellow’s poems about a Norseman who fled with his wife from fellow Norsemen and landed somewhere on the shores of North America. It was titled “The Skeleton in Armor,” and I think it was inspired after someone found the ruins of some ancient tower predating the 16-hundreds.
Goths and the Vikings were moving south along the rivers to Ukraine. Swedes went to south during the Little Ice Age.
And 1/3 of Finns died of starvation from corp failure – there wasn’t any “Aid” in those days.
Yet even more evidence that the claim of there being 50 million climate refugees was just a preposterous exaggeration!
Janice Moore
“23:00 – GISP (Greenland Ice Sheet Project) down to 3,064 ft/bedrock in central Greenland = record of climate; around 1,000 A.D. climate was “fine;” later it grew colder.”
I went back to the video, and you made a very small error, it is meters not feet of Ice core. Essentially 2 miles of ice core. Otherwise your summation was very good.
I wonder how our modern society will learn to survive a significant cooling event like the mini-ice age. Hopefully we can learn to adapt, and pool resources, including fossil fuels.
For information my major income is from the oil industry, and it is one half of what is was just 4 months ago.
Dear Mr. Landreth,
Thank you for correcting my error and thanks for the kind words. Cool! Somebody actually read what I wrote!! 🙂 (oh, I just put that in to see….. naa, I really did mess up, heh) Congratulations on making money by investing in our BEST (all around) source of energy. Goooo, internal combustion engine (for instance)!
With hopes that “half” is still enough…,
Janice
P.S. I’m going to link your correction to just below my video comment (in the slight chance that someone else will read it, heh).