Epic sea level rise drove Vikings out of Greenland

The Vikings are remembered as fierce fighters, but even these powerful warriors were not comparable to climate change. Scientists recently discovered that ice sheet growth and rising sea levels caused massive coastal floods that flooded Nordic farms and eventually expelled the Vikings from Greenland in the 15th century.

The Viking First scaffolding in the south Greenland Around 985 AD, the Norwegian-born explorer Eric Sovalson, also known as “Erik the Red,” arrived in Greenland after being expelled from Iceland. Other Viking settlers soon followed, forming communities in the centuries-old prosperous Eystribyggð (Eastern Settlement) and Vestribyggð (Western Settlement). (When the Vikings arrived, Greenland was already inhabited by the Dorset culture, an indigenous group of Inuit people before they arrived in the Arctic Circle. According to the University of California, Riverside).

Around the 15th century, signs of Nordic settlement in the area disappeared from archaeological records. Researchers used to Climate change Due to economic changes, the Vikings may have abandoned Greenland. According to data released Wednesday (December 15) at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) annual meeting in New Orleans and online this week, the new findings show that the ocean rises miles along the coastline. It shows that it played an important role by sinking.

Related: Fierce Fighter: Seven Secrets of the Viking Sailors

Between the 14th and 19th centuries, Europe and North America experienced a period of fairly cool temperatures known as the Little Ice Age. Marisa Julia Boregin, a doctoral candidate for the Faculty of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, said the Greenland ice sheet, the vast ice sheet that covers much of Greenland, grows even larger in these chilly conditions. I said it would be. AGU meeting.

As the ice sheet progressed, its increased weight weighed on the underlying substrate, making coastal areas more prone to flooding, Boregin said. At the same time, the increased gravitational pull between the expanding ice sheet and the large amount of sea ice has pushed more seawater to the coast of Greenland. These two processes could have caused widespread flooding along the coastline — “just where the Vikings settled,” Borreggine said.

Scientists tested the hypothesis by modeling the estimated ice growth over 400 years of the Nordic occupation in southwestern Greenland and adding those calculations to a model showing sea level rise during that time. We then analyzed maps of known Viking sites to see how the findings match archaeological evidence of the end of the Viking presence in Greenland.

Their models show that as the sea around Greenland rises, Viking settlements are flooded by as much as 16 feet (5 meters), affecting about 54 square miles (140 square kilometers) of coastal land. According to the model, this flood would have submerged the land that the Vikings used for agriculture and cattle grazing.

But perhaps the reason the Vikings left Greenland wasn’t just rising sea levels. Other types of challenges can cause collapse even in long-standing communities, so that a complete storm of external pressure, such as climate change, social unrest, and resource depletion, permanently abandons their place of residence to the Vikings. Boregin said it might have driven him.

“Climate and environmental changes, changing resource conditions, monopoly product supply and demand flows for foreign markets, and the combination of interactions with the Inuit in the north may all have contributed to this migration. “She said. “Perhaps a combination of these factors led to the migration of Norsemen further west from Greenland.”

Originally published on Live Science.