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Was Greenland Ever Truly 'Green'?

N

nataraja

Gone But Not Forgotten
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OK, i just watched a programme on BBC4 about climate change which touched on the Viking settlements in Greenland, and the "Mediaeval Warm Period" in which they supposedly settled and farmed (as well as hunting, fishing and trading) there (presumably why Greenland is now a province or some such of Denmark)...

Now, according to that programme, during that warm period (approx AD 1000-1400) it was warm enough for the Vikings to farm sheep and cattle there, and they showed some 10th-12th century style ruins on the coast (which was a *little* bit green, but had a big wall of ice right behind it). But in the same programme they showed the climate change graph which showed that, although it was significantly warmer in the mediaeval period than in the "Little Ice Age" after it (in its broadest definition about 1500-1850 - when there were "Frost Fairs" every winter on the frozen Thames, etc), the change in climate since the Industrial Revolution makes it *far* warmer now than in mediaeval times - yet Greenland is only now starting to lose its ice cap again, and as far as i know it's still far too cold there to successfully farm cattle and sheep...

So was Greenland really "green" in the 10th to 15th century, or was it all Viking propaganda (i've heard the story about Erik the Red telling everyone it was much "greener" than it was in order to encourage migration for his trade and/or imperialistic purposes)? If so doesn't that imply that, even if globally the temperature is warmer now than in mediaeval times, "locally" in the North Atlantic it must have been warmer than today for Greenland not to have been ice covered then? Or (conspiracy hat on) does this have anything to do with "Vinland", and maybe the real "green land" being America?

I'd also be interested in *how* they managed to work out mediaeval temperatures...
 
They established dairy and sheep farms throughout the unglaciated areas of the south and built churches, a monastery, a nunnery, and a cathedral boasting an imported bronze bell and greenish tinted glass windows.

The Greenlanders prospered. From the number of farms in both colonies, whose 400 or so stone ruins still dot the landscape, archaeologists guess that the population may have risen to a peak of about 5,000.
Click to expand...

From here:

http://www.archaeology.org/online/features/greenland/
 
Hmmm, it may be getting warmer now that when Greenland was green. But presumably the ice had more time to melt back then.
 
Xanatico said:
Hmmm, it may be getting warmer now that when Greenland was green. But presumably the ice had more time to melt back then.
Click to expand...

Aye, maybe in a few hundred years Greenland will be 'green' again? Assuming we keep up with our efforts to ignore global warming concerns :D
 
Xanatico said:
Hmmm, it may be getting warmer now that when Greenland was green. But presumably the ice had more time to melt back then.
Click to expand...

Some fjords on Greenland still got trees. Noticed that when watching a TV documentary/report about global warming on CNN.
These trees might have been planted recently(last 100-150 years) by people living in the fjords.
 
Egypt was once green and wet, like monsoon weather, this is evident in the rain gullies of the sphinx, so I don't see why not :) climates change
 
Why did Greenland’s Vikings disappear?
By Eli KintischNov. 10, 2016 , 9:00 AM

In 1721, missionary Hans Egede sailed a ship called The Hope from Norway to Greenland, seeking Norse farmers whom Europeans hadn't heard from in 200 years in order to convert them to Protestantism. He explored iceberg-dotted fjords that gave way to gentle valleys, and silver lakes that shimmered below the massive ice cap. But when he asked the Inuit hunters he met about the Norse, they showed him crumbling stone church walls: the only remnants of 500 years of occupation. "What has been the fate of so many human beings, so long cut off from all intercourse with the more civilized world?" Egede wrote in an account of the journey. "Were they destroyed by an invasion of the natives … [or] perished by the inclemency of the climate, and the sterility of the soil?"

Archaeologists still wonder today. No chapter of Arctic history is more mysterious than the disappearance of these Norse settlements sometime in the 15th century. Theories for the colony's failure have included everything from sinister Basque pirates to the Black Plague. But historians have usually pinned most responsibility on the Norse themselves, arguing that they failed to adapt to a changing climate. The Norse settled Greenland from Iceland during a warm period around 1000 C.E. But even as a chilly era called the Little Ice Age set in, the story goes, they clung to raising livestock and church-building while squandering natural resources like soil and timber. Meanwhile, the seal-hunting, whale-eating Inuit survived in the very same environment.

Over the last decade, however, new excavations across the North Atlantic have forced archaeologists to revise some of these long-held views. An international research collective called the North Atlantic Biocultural Organisation (NABO) has accumulated precise new data on ancient settlement patterns, diet, and landscape. The findings suggest that the Greenland Norse focused less on livestock and more on trade, especially in walrus ivory, and that for food they relied more on the sea than on their pastures. There's no doubt that climate stressed the colony, but the emerging narrative is not of an agricultural society short on food, but a hunting society short on labor and susceptible to catastrophes at sea and social unrest. ...

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/why-did-greenland-s-vikings-disappear
 
Fascinating stuff. Greenland is one of those mysterious landmasses which feature strikingly on maps and atlases but we never hear any news about them! They don't write . . . they don't elect crazy people . . . :huh:
 
I remember reading some years ago that 'Greenland' was so-called as propaganda to encourage more Vikings to emigrate there... (It sounded better than Iceland.)
 
Whatever about it being green, some of the indigenous Inuits lived off the fat of the sea

Mummified Inuits living in Greenland 500 years ago suffered from clogged-up arteries despite feasting on a diet of fish rich in omega-3
  • Atherosclerosis is a condition in which the arteries clog up with fat and calcium
  • Human remains with the condition have been found as far back as 4,000 BC
  • However none of the previous ancient examples enjoyed a marine-based diet
  • Researchers studied four Inuit mummies who would have hunted using kayaks
  • They found evidence of arterial build up possibly caused by smoke from fires

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7830147/Mummified-Inuits-lived-500-years-ago-clogged-arteries-despite-omega-3-rich-fishy-diets.html
 
Picked up a charity shop book last year called With 'Plane, Boats, & Camera in Greenland, by Ernst Sorge, an account of Dr Fanck's Greenland Expedition in 1932 (lovely photos). He set off with a German film crew to do glacier research and make a nature documentary - because it is difficult and time-consuming to find and film polar bears in the Wild, the boat crew bought three with them (and seals) on loan from Hamberg Zoo. Problem was containing the bears once they had been released into the bay for filming. Long story short, the Greenlanders employed to build the fence suddenly downed tools, shouted a single word Arpek (whale) and ran off. Apparently the Danish Government steamer Sonja had harpooned and landed a 15 metre Greenland whale and the entire local Colony turned up to process it. Men, women and children gorged themselves on whaleflesh for hours and then the huskies had their turn on the entrails - for the next 24 hours no-one in the Colony was fit for work, many of the dogs had literally gorged themselves to death. Guess everyone ate as if they didn't know where the next meal would come from.
Omega-3 good, whale blubber not so good.
 
Yes, its always mystified me...Particularly as many of the settlers were not Farming folk, but hunters.

would a Coastal Saami have difficulty in living under such conditions?
 
ramonmercado said:
Why did Greenland’s Vikings disappear?
Click to expand...

Here's a report on another, more recent, study that supports the 2016 one noted above and further confirms the Norse settlers became over-dependent upon the walrus ivory trade. They were left in an unsustainable situation following regional climatic change, over-harvesting of local walrus populations, and the collapse of their competitive advantage in the European ivory trade.

This study focuses more on the over-hunting aspect of the story, but adds some additional evidence and info concerning the other dimensions of the Norse settlers' vulnerabilities and declining fortunes.
Over-hunting walruses contributed to the collapse of Norse Greenland, study suggests

... Latest research from the universities of Cambridge, Oslo and Trondheim has found that, for hundreds of years, almost all ivory traded across Europe came from walruses hunted in seas only accessible via Norse settlements in south-western Greenland. ...

... the study also indicates that, as time wore on, the ivory came from smaller animals, often female; with genetic and archaeological evidence suggesting they were sourced from ever farther north - meaning longer and more treacherous hunting voyages for less reward.

Increasingly globalised trade saw elephant ivory flood European markets in the 13th century, and fashions changed. There is little evidence of walrus ivory imports to mainland Europe after 1400.

Dr James H. Barrett, from the University of Cambridge's Department of Archaeology, argues that the Norse abandonment of Greenland may have been precipitated by a "perfect storm" of depleted resources and volatile prices, exacerbated by climate change.
Click to expand...
FULL STORY: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/uoc-owc010320.php
 
Mythopoeika said:
... Greenland does have some vegetation, in spite of the massive ice coverage. We also know that the Vikings had a settlement there until the ice encroached, forcing them to the coast.
Click to expand...
Didn’t the Vikings grow barley on Greenland?
 
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Yeah, but what have the Vikings done for us?

Well, in Greenland they apparently did quite a lot, and for quite an extended period of time.
It wasn't thousands and thousands of years ago.
No, it was as recently as the 1400s.

Extract.
Those tough seafaring warriors came to one of the world’s most formidable environments and made it their home. And they didn’t just get by: They built manor houses and hundreds of farms; they imported stained glass; they raised sheep, goats and cattle; they traded furs, walrus-tusk ivory, live polar bears and other exotic arctic goods with Europe. “These guys were really out on the frontier,” says Andrew Dugmore, a geographer at the University of Edinburgh. “They’re not just there for a few years. They’re there for generations—for centuries.”

Excellent piece in Smithsonian Magazine.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-greenland-vikings-vanished-180962119/
 
So maybe rising sea levels did the Greenland Vikings in.

In 1721, a Norwegian missionary set sail for Greenland in the hopes of converting the Viking descendants living there to Protestantism.

When he arrived, the only traces he found of the Nordic society were ruins of settlements that had been abandoned 300 years earlier.

There is no written record to explain why the Vikings left or died out. But a new simulation of Greenland’s coastline reveals that as the ice sheet covering most of the island started to expand around that time, sea levels rose drastically, researchers report December 15 at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in New Orleans.

These shifting coastlines would have inundated grazing areas and farmland, and could have helped bring about the end of the Nordic way of life in Greenland, says Marisa Borreggine, a geophysicist at Harvard University.

Greenland was first colonized by Vikings in 985 by a group of settlers in 14 ships led by Erik the Red, who had been banished from neighboring Iceland for manslaughter. Erik and his followers settled across southern Greenland, where they and their descendants hunted for seals, grazed livestock, built churches and traded walrus ivory with European mainlanders.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vikings-greenland-rising-sea-level-climate
 
In 1721? You had priests in Greenland before that. Hans Egede for example, who reported a sea serpent sighting.
 
True or not, I have read that Erik the Red did a real scam job telling everyone that Greenland was green to attract more settlers.
 
Back then there was less ice and at least partial forest.

It probably was as attractive as much of the rest of the Viking worlds, and certainly abundant in resources...and probably uninhabited.

Apart from its remoteness, not a bad place to live.
 
Drought finished off the Greenland Vikings?

For more than 450 years, Norse settlers from Scandinavia lived—sometimes even thrived—in southern Greenland. Then, they vanished. Their mysterious disappearance in the 14th century has been linked to everything from plummeting temperatures and poor land management to plague and pirate raids. Now, researchers have discovered an additional factor that might have helped seal the settlers’ fate: drought.

The Vikings raided, traded, and eventually formed Norse settlements throughout northwestern Europe, including in Iceland. According to Icelandic legend, an explorer named Erik the Red then sailed west around 985 C.E. and established two settlements in southern Greenland. At its peak, about 3000 Norse farmers raised cattle, sheep, and goats on the island.

In the new study, Boyang Zhao, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and colleagues analyzed mud from the bottom of a lake in southern Greenland for clues about the climate Norse settlers experienced during their time there, between about 985 and 1450 C.E. The lake lies within one of the two settlements (the Eastern Settlement), near a cluster of stone ruins that were once Norse homes and cow sheds.

Last year, the team showed the biochemistry of bacteria in the lake changes in response to temperature. For the new study, they extracted the remains of long-dead microbes from the layers of mud on the lake bed, which they dated with radiocarbon. By tracking changes in bacterial chemistry through time, they reconstructed past temperatures. ...

https://www.science.org/content/art...-may-have-vanished-because-they-ran-out-water
 
When Greenland was really Green.

In a bleak valley not far from Greenland’s massive ice sheet, scientists have reconstructed a rich ancient ecosystem, down to its roving mastodons and smooth-barked birch trees.

The clues come from the oldest DNA ever recovered: 2-million-year-old snippets of genetic material from more than 100 kinds of animals and plants, extracted from buried sediments. The feat may provide a window into how life will evolve in our warming world and perhaps even allow scientists to resurrect long-lost genes to help modern species cope with climate change.

“It’s a tour de force. Simply astounding,” says Ross MacPhee, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History who was not involved with the work, which appears today in Nature. “The idea that we can now recover these really short fragments of DNA and make sense of them is pretty exciting,” adds Beth Shapiro, an ancient DNA expert at the University of California, Santa Cruz, also not involved. “We can now extend further back in time than we thought was possible.”

The findings demonstrate the power of environmental DNA (eDNA)—genetic material extracted not from individual organisms, but from the environment—to reconstruct entire ecosystems: in this case, a coastal forest including poplars, thujas, and other conifers that no longer grow in Greenland, plus reindeer, lemmings, black geese, horseshoe crabs, and mastodons. “No one would have predicted an ecosystem like this. Some species you find further south in Greenland, but a number you don’t find in the Arctic at all,” says Eske Willerslev, a paleogeneticist at the University of Cambridge who led the 40-person team behind the findings. “It’s an ecosystem with no analog in the present day.” ...

https://www.science.org/content/article/lost-world-northern-greenland-conjured-dna-ancient-soil
 
It could become green again.

A sharp spike in Greenland temperatures since 1995 showed the giant northern island 1.5C hotter than its 20th-century average, the warmest in more than 1,000 years, according to new ice core data.

Until now Greenland ice cores – a glimpse into long-running temperatures before thermometers – had not shown much of a clear signal of global warming on the remotest north central part of the island, at least compared with the rest of the world.

But the ice cores also had not been updated since 1995. Newly analysed cores, drilled in 2011, show a dramatic rise in temperature in the previous 15 years, according to a study in the journal Nature.

“We keep on (seeing) rising temperatures between 1990s and 2011,” said study lead author Maria Hoerhold, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. “We have now a clear signature of global warming.”

https://www.breakingnews.ie/world/n...ws-sharp-greenland-warming-spike-1420576.html
 
l remember seeing a telly Beeboid in Greenland, covering the discovery of a Viking farm which had been revealed by a retreating glacier.

Clad in his brand new expense-account parka, he intoned the required pieties about Warble Gloaming.

l don’t remember him raising the issue of what had caused the ice to retreat centuries ago, enabling the Vikings to build the farm in the first place…

Odd, that.

:rolleyes:

maximus otter
 
Has anyone here been to Greenland? I've flown over it, and I couldn't think of a more desolate place to try to eke out an existence.
 
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