Washington, May 31 (IANS) A sudden, short spell of cold weather known as The Little Ice Age gripped Greenland in the beginning of the 1400s, wiping out its Norse population.
Now, researchers led by Brown University show the climate set in motion the end of the Greenland Norse.
The finding comes from the first reconstruction of 5,600 years of climate history, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports.
Unlike ice cores taken from the Greenland ice sheet hundreds of miles inland, the new lake core measurements reflect air temperatures where the Vikings lived, according to a Brown University statement.
‘This is the first quantitative temperature record from the area they were living in,’ said William D’Andrea, previously a geological scientist at Brown University and a study co-author.
‘The record shows how quickly temperature changed in the region and by how much,’ said another co-author Yongsong Huang, professor of geological sciences at Brown University.
Vikings’ sedentary lifestyle, reliance on agriculture and livestock for food and combative relations with the neighbouring Inuit are believed to be contributing factors to their disappearance.
