2023-04-23 20:00:00
According to the Nordic sagas, a type of anonymous literary work originating in Iceland and dating between the 12th and 15th centuries, the Vikings arrived in Greenland in the year 985. It is believed that the first to reach the island was the Norwegian explorer nicknamed as Erik the Redafter having had to go into exile from Iceland for murder.
Since then, the Vikings have occupied Greenland and founded some colonies, which are estimated to have housed up to 10,000 inhabitants at their peak, attracted by the promise of the so-called “green land”. However, in the mid-15th century the Vikings began to abandon their settlements due to factors that have not remained entirely clear to this day.
Now, however, a new study published in the journal PNAS under the title Sea-level rise in Southwest Greenland as a contributor to Viking abandonment, seems to point to the weather as one of the definitive factors in the capitulation of the Viking people on the island.
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To reach this conclusion, the team led by the Harvard University researcher, Marisa Borreggineused the geomorphological and paleoclimatic data published to date to model ice sheet growth and sea level rise in Greenland during the Viking occupation and explore the influence of coastal flooding on the abandonment of habitats. settlements.
Thus, the Viking occupation of Greenland coincided between 2 climatic periods; he Medieval Warm Periodwhich took place between the years 900 and 1250 and the little ice age, which started finished the first.
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Kingittorsuaq runestone, testimony to the Norse presence in Greenland.
During the Little Ice Age, the Greenland ice sheet moved toward the ocean, a fact that according to Borregine’s team’s geophysical models resulted in a subsidence of the crust and an increasing gravitational attraction between the ocean and the ice sheet growing, all of which would have motivated a sea level rise estimated 3 meters near the ice margin, which would have caused the coastline to recede hundreds of meters.
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All of this is consistent with archaeological evidence, which suggests that many Viking settlements in Greenland were close to the shores of glacier-carved fjords for millennia, making them particularly vulnerable to sea level rise.
With all this new data on the table, the authors conclude, local sea level rise is a previously overlooked factor, but one that was likely a major contributor to the Viking abandonment of Greenland.
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