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Nine gold pendants with rare horse symbols, ten gold beads, and three gold rings from the 6th century were recently discovered by a metal detectorist in Southwestern Norway. Erlend Bore just wanted a hobby. So just before this summer, he bought a metal detector. To get him off his couch and go treasure hunting. He was searching around the shore of the island Rennesøy in Stavanger, in Southwestern Norway, when the metal detector started to beep. In a lump of soil, he saw something that looked like gold coins. “At first I thought I’d found chocolate money with a gold...

Vikings occupied Greenland from roughly 985 to 1450, farming and building communities before abandoning their settlements and mysteriously vanishing. Why they disappeared has long been a puzzle, but a new paper from the Harvard University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) determines that one factor—rising sea level—likely played a major role...The departure of these Viking settlers coincided with the beginning of the period known as the Little Ice Age, which had a particular impact on the North Atlantic. But while cooling and freezing might seem likely to lower sea levels, a variety of factors combined to have the opposite...

Europe's mysterious "Little Ice Age" has been traced back to a massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia - thanks to Pink Floyd. It lasted centuries and led to the Thames Frost fairs, when the river froze over for months at a time - turning it into a skating rink. A generally warm medieval period was followed by a mostly cold spell - from the 14th to the 19th Centuries. The weather phenomenon has baffled climatologists for decades. A study - inspired by the 70s rock legends' Dark Side of the Moon - now shows it was triggered by a catastrophic eruption...

How did people live and die during the harshest months of the year? How did they stay warm? What did they eat? How did they keep themselves entertained in an age before modern day luxuries like electric blankets, double glazing, and Netflix? The onset of the Little Ice Age, between 1300 until about 1870 meant that the long, dark winters of the Late Middle Ages were colder and more dangerous. With starvation and death from illness always threatening to strike, winter was a frightening time. Welcome to Medieval Madness.Surviving Winter in the Middle Ages... | MedievalMadness | 178K subscribers |...

For most of human history, the disasters wrought by nature were utterly unpredictable, their causes wholly unknown. They were merely a random act of God that could lay waste to whole cities without warning. On the morning of May 20, 1202, thousands of people across an enormous swath of the Earth experienced such destruction.The Forgotten 1202 earthquakeThe History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered1.13M subscribers | 79,737 views | December 12, 2022

For the better part of four centuries, Greenland's southern coast defined the westernmost edge of Viking occupation. Seduced by visions of verdant hills and fertile ground, in the late 10th century waves of Norse migrants set sail in hopes of an easier life abroad. At its peak, the colony's population numbered in the thousands, spread out across three major settlements. And then it ended. No word of hardship. No record of struggle. By the middle of the 15th century, the Norse experiment in Greenland was a bust. New research suggests we might have had it all wrong about the prime...

Rising sea levels may be seen as a very modern phenomenon, but according to a new study, it really became a significant issue more than 150 years ago. Researchers have studied a global database of sea-level records spanning the last 2,000 years, based on archeological and biological evidence at global sites. These sites include Pelham Bay in New York, Cheesequake in New Jersey, Vioarholmi in Iceland, Aasiaat in Greenland and Loch Laxford in Scotland. Modern rates of sea level rise began emerging in 1863 following the Industrial Revolution, coinciding with evidence for early ocean warming and glaciers melting, the experts...

I wrote last week about the coming Grand Solar Minimum, something that will have much more impact on the environment than anything we puny humans can do. It generated a lot of interest from all sides, so it’s time to delve deeper into what we can expect. Starting with the hype: During the last grand solar minimum (GSM), the Maunder Minimum of 1645 to 1715, glaciers advanced, rivers froze, sea ice expanded -- in short, the Little Ice Age. Is another one is almost upon us? Probably not. Maunder occurred at the tail end of a bi-millennial cycle. These cycles...

The last time this occurred was between 1650 and 1715, during what's known as the Little Ice Age in Earth's Northern Hemisphere... Scientists have known this solar minimum was coming because it's a regular aspect of the sun's cycle. Sunspots were peaking in 2014, with low points beginning in 2019, according to NASA. The sun is also responsible for what's known as space weather, sending particles and cosmic rays streaming across our solar system. The sun's strongly magnetised sunspots release solar flares, which can send X-rays and ultraviolet radiation hurtling toward Earth. Even when the sun is quiet during the...

Archaeologists have found evidence that people on an inland Icelandic farm burned chunks of whale bone as fuel during a 17th- and 18th-century cold snap... Gröf Farm in southern Iceland -- is more than 30 kilometers from the coast. Whale bones are much more porous than those of land mammals, and the open spaces collect oily deposits of fat, which may help whales to maintain buoyancy. That fat also makes the bones easy to burn... Coastal peoples in high Arctic latitudes, where wood is scarce, have traditionally burned oil-laden whale bones for heat and cooking. Archaeologists have also found burned...

By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported....

The power of viruses is well documented in human history. Swarms of little viral Davids have repeatedly laid low the great Goliaths of human civilization, most famously in the devastating pandemics that swept the New World during European conquest and settlement. In recent years, there has been growing evidence for the hypothesis that the effect of the pandemics in the Americas wasn't confined to killing indigenous peoples. Global climate appears to have been altered as well. Stanford University researchers have conducted a comprehensive analysis of data detailing the amount of charcoal contained in soils and lake sediments at the sites...

Lake Sediments Record Climate Change At Cahokia INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA —National Public Radio reports that climatologist Broxton Bird of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and colleagues analyzed layers of calcite crystals interspersed with layers of mud on the bottom of Indiana’s Martin Lake in order to learn about historic rainfall levels at Cahokia. The study suggests that beginning in the 900s, the Central Mississippi Valley received more rain than usual. And carbon isotopes found in skeletons at Mississippian cities indicate that people ate a lot of corn. “That comes at right around 950, and that’s around the time the population at Cahokia...

Make the most of this summer because it could be your last decent one: winter is coming as the planet enters the most devastating cooling period since the 65-year Maunder Minimum of the 17th and early 18th centuries. This is the dire forecast of Professor Valentina Zharkova, a solar physicist at Northumbria University, who has based her prediction on sun spot activity – known to be a significant driver of global climate – which is currently very low and likely to get even lower during the next three solar cycles. She has spoken about her research and her battle to get it taken...

It has often been cited as one of the classic examples of how changes in climate have shaped human history. Circa the year 985, Erik the Red led 25 ships from Iceland to Greenland, launching a Norse settlement there and giving the vast ice continent the name "Greenland." Within just a few decades, the Norse -- sometimes also dubbed Vikings -- would make it to Newfoundland as well. They maintained settlements of up to a few thousand people in southwest Greenland for several centuries, keeping livestock and hunting seals, building churches whose ruins still stand today, and sending back valuable...

Europe's chill linked to disease By Kate Ravilious Bubonic plague may have wiped out over a third of Europe's population Europe's "Little Ice Age" may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study. Pollen and leaf data support the idea that millions of trees sprang up on abandoned farmland, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would have had the effect of cooling the climate, a team from Utrecht University, Netherlands, says. The Little Ice Age was a period of some 300 years when Europe experienced a dip in average temperatures. Dr...

The Earth could be headed for a 'mini ice age' researchers have warned. A new study claims to have cracked predicting solar cycles - and says that between 2020 and 2030 solar cycles will cancel each other out. This, they say, will lead to a phenomenon known as the 'Maunder minimum' - which has previously been known as a mini ice age when it hit between 1646 and 1715, even causing London's River Thames to freeze over. The new model of the Sun's solar cycle is producing unprecedentedly accurate predictions of irregularities within the Sun's 11-year heartbeat. It draws on...

A new study appears to answer contentious questions about the onset and cause of Earth’s Little Ice Age, a period of cooling temperatures that began after the Middle Ages and lasted into the late 19th century. According to the new study, the Little Ice Age began abruptly between A.D. 1275 and 1300, triggered by repeated, explosive volcanism and sustained by a self-perpetuating sea ice-ocean feedback system in the North Atlantic Ocean, according to University of Colorado Boulder Professor Gifford Miller, who led the study. The primary evidence comes from radiocarbon dates from dead vegetation emerging from rapidly melting icecaps on Baffin...

Climate experts warn the amount of light and warmth released by the sun is nosediving to levels "not seen for centuries". They fear a repeat of the so-called 'Maunder Minimum' which triggered Arctic winter whiteouts and led to the River Thames freezing 300 years ago. The Met Office-led study warns although the effect will be offset by recent global warming, Britain faces years of unusually cold winters. A spokesman said: "A return to low solar activity not seen for centuries could increase the chances of cold winters in Europe and eastern parts of the United States but wouldn't halt global...

The Norman castle at Pevensey Bay is one of the most historic sites in Britain. It is built inside of a Roman wall, and was William the Conqueror’s headquarters. It was also used as a defense outpost by Brits and Americans in WWII It is currently several miles from the sea, but at the time when the Romans and Normans built the structures, the water lapped right up to the edge of the stone. The map below shows the bay 900 years ago, and the current seashore as a dashed line.