Did you know about the Norse tragedy in Greenland?

Tragedy in Greenland

The climate record from ice cores has shown how fast a change in climate can occur. In Greenland, in the early 1400s, Norse settlers were wiped out because of a climate change that made it impossible for them to continue to survive.

The Norse first settled in Greenland around A.D. 930, during an unusually mild period throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere. They established settlements and a subsistence lifestyle along the south and southwest coasts, the only habitable part of Greenland. For nearly five centuries the Norse settlements persevered, depending on their cattle, sheep and goats, as well as on seal and caribou hunts.

Contacts between the Norse settlements and the outside world ceased shortly after A.D. 1360 in the southwest and A.D. 1450 in the south (Ogilvie et al., 2000). We now know that as the weather got steadily colder and the pasture and farming lands shrank under the advancing ice and snow, the inhabitants suffered a painful annihilation. The rapid cooling that signaled the beginning of the Little Ice Age in the early 1300s caused drift ice to expand over the North Atlantic, which hampered and eventually halted navigation between Greenland and Iceland.

The Norse did not survive; the Inuit did. Why?

One theory as to why the Inuit survived while the Norse did not is that the Inuit hunting skills and techniques were more suited to the hostile climatic conditions. The Norse failed to adopt the hunting practices of the Inuit and instead clung to traditional subsistence methods that were not suited to the new climatic regime. It is also possible that weakened Norse were overwhelmed by hostile Inuit.