The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 Read Online Free Page A

and 1200, warmer air and sea surface temperatures led to less
pack ice than in earlier and later centuries. Ice conditions between
Labrador and Iceland were unusually favorable for serious voyaging.

    The Norse were not the first visitors to Iceland. Irish monks, seeking
peaceful refuges far from the political and social turmoil at home, had
preceded them. The oceangoing prelates settled the Faeroe Islands by
A.D. 700 and sailed as far north as Iceland by 790. Legend has it they followed the spring migration of wild geese to land. But these remarkable
seamen were unable to (or in any case did not) maintain a permanent settlement. Norse ships arrived three-quarters of a century later, at a time
when January pack ice rarely reached the island's northern coast and both
winter and summer temperatures were usually higher than today.
    The ocean currents and atmospheric conditions near Iceland have an
important bearing on temperature and rainfall throughout northwestern
Europe. Warm water from the Atlantic and cold water from the Arctic
converge on Iceland's shores. A branch of the cold East Greenland current
sweeps along the north and east coasts of the island. The warmer
Irminger current flows along the south shore and is an arm of the North
Atlantic current, which, in turn, originates in the Gulf Stream deep in the
North Atlantic Ocean. Today, in average years, the January to April pack
ice edge lies about 90 to 100 kilometers off the northwestern corner of
Iceland. In a mild year, the edge is 200 to 240 kilometers away, whereas
an exceptionally cold season can bring pack right to the north coast and
even around the eastern side of the island to the southern shore. An Irish
monk named Dicuil, writing in A.D. 825, recorded that his brethren living in Iceland found no ice along the south coast but encountered it
about a day's sail away from the north shore, the position the pack has occupied for most of the twentieth century. In contrast, during a period of
great cold between 1350 and 1380, sea ice came so close to land that
Greenland polar bears came ashore.
    The new colony would never have survived had not the winters been
milder than in earlier centuries. Even in good years, the Icelanders scrabbled for a living from thin soils and bitterly cold seas. In bad years they
courted disaster. Oddur Einersson observed in 1580 that "the Icelanders
who have settled on the northern coasts are never safe from this most terrible visitor.... Sometimes it is absent from the shores of Iceland for many years at a time.... Sometimes it is scarcely to be seen for a whole decade
or longer. . . . Sometimes it occurs almost every year." In a bad ice year,
such as those of the 1180s or 1287, people starved, especially when several
harsh winters followed one upon the next. In the extreme winter of 1695,
ice blocked the entire coast in January and stayed until summer. A contemporary account tells us: "The same frosts and severe conditions came
to most parts of the country; in most places sheep and horses perished in
large numbers, and most people had to slaughter half their stock of cattle
and sheep, both in order to save hay and for food since fishing could not
be conducted because of the extensive ice cover."2 Icelandic agriculture is
vulnerable to harsh winters to this day. For example, intense icing and low
temperatures during the severe winter of 1967 reduced farmers' productivity by about a fifth-this in an era of improved farming methods and livestock, indoor heating, and a sophisticated transport infrastructure.

    The Norse brought with them a medieval dairying economy like that
at home, which they combined with seal hunting and cod fishing.
Warmer summer temperatures allowed them to obtain reasonably ample
hay harvests for winter fodder and also to plant barley, even near the
north coast, where it was cultivated until the twelfth century. After that,
farmers could never grow barley in Iceland until the