The surprising reason why Vikings abandoned a successful settlement

[dalton99a]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/24/world/why-vikings-left-greenland-scn/index.html

The surprising reason why Vikings abandoned a successful settlement
By Ashley Strickland, CNN
Updated 10:19 AM ET, Thu March 24, 2022

(CNN) For years, researchers have sought to understand why Vikings abandoned one of their settlements in Greenland after centuries of success. While some experts have suggested that dropping temperatures may have been the cause, new research suggests the cold wasn't a factor.

Instead, the Vikings faced a new adversary they couldn't defeat: drought.

A study detailing the findings published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

The colder temperature hypothesis has persisted for years because of something called the Little Ice Age that occurred between 1300 and 1850, when cooling temperatures persisted in the North Atlantic region.


A Norse farm once stood adjacent to the lake, which helped provide an environmental history of the area.


Fig. 4. The reconstructed climate conditions from southern Greenland and the Norse diet transition.
(A) BrGDGT-inferred summer water temperature (SWT) from southern Greenland. An error bar of ±0.52°C from the calibration (19) is shown with the gray shading. (B) Leaf wax hydrogen isotope-inferred ΔRH from southern Greenland. Blue shading represents the 90% CI. The thick blue line represents 5-point running mean. (C) Percentage of marine sourced food in the Norse diet (46). (D) The ratio of marine to terrestrial mammal bones [number of identified specimens (NISP)] from a Norse farm in Qassiarsuk (47). Orange bar indicates the time span of Norse settlement.

[lagomorph777]

1. Interesting. These are the same people who came to America 500 years before Columbus.

They had a small part-time settlement (today called "L'Anse aux Meadows&quot on Newfoundland; it was used only for a short time (perhaps a century) around 1020 AD.