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October 27, 2003
Seattle, Washington, USA

Late Holocene Environmental Change in SW Greenland and the Fate of the Norse

Naja Mikkelsen¹, Antoon Kuijpers^2
1Department of Paleoclimate and Glaciology, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), Thoravej 8, Copenhagen, DK 1350, Denmark, Phone +45-3814-2000, Fax +45-3814-2050, nm@geus.dk
²Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Thoravej 8, Copenhagen NV, DK 1350, Denmark, Phone +45-3814-2367, Fax +45-3814-2050, aku@geus.dk

Icelandic Sagas report that settlers from Iceland founded a Norse colony in South Greenland around AD 985. When the Norse arrived in Greenland they quickly established themselves as farmers in the deep and lush fjords of southwest Greenland and in a colony 500 km further to the north. The Norse colonists brought with them the social and religious culture and structure of Western Europe, and only slowly adapted a few surviving strategies from the Inuit way of living.

The Norse arrived in Greenland close to the peak of the Medieval warming period. This climatic condition made it possible for the Norse to sustain a farming culture, where the live stock that was grazing in mountain pastures during the summer season while grass was harvested at the lower altitude around the farms for winter fodder. The Norse, however, lived their European way of life under harsh and marginal sub arctic conditions and thus at the edge of sustainability - and almost 500 years after their arrival they had vanished from Greenland by the end of the fourteenth century.

The northern Norse settlement was depopulated around AD 1350 according to Icelandic annals, where as the Norse community in south Greenland survived another hundred years. The last historical document about the Norse in Greenland is an Icelandic account of a wedding taking place AD 1408. What subsequently happened to this northernmost outpost of western Christianity has not been recorded by any written sources.

The Medieval Warm Period where he Norse arrived in Greenland was followed by a climatic deterioration in south Greenland around AD 1400 that culminated in the Little Ice age. The impact on the Norse of theses natural climate changes has been considerable. Medieval Icelandic documents report on expanding sea ice off southeast Greenland just after the Norse colonisation that hampered the important shipping trade with Iceland and Europe. The climatic deterioration resulted in a disastrous shortening of the summer season and an intensification of the wind stress over southern Greenland which enhanced soil erosion. Also a relatively fast subsidence (3m/1000 years) of this part of Greenland lead to flooding of the lowlands that were important for the Norse farming culture. Climatic and hydrographic changes in the Norse settlement area were therefore significant during the period when the Norse vanished from Greenland and may have contributed to the loss of the Norse culture.

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