ENVIRONMENT

The Little Ice Age

~1250 CE

History · Middle Ages · Holocene · Meghalayan

From about 1250 to the mid-nineteenth century, the world ran cold: Alpine glaciers advanced over farms, the Thames froze for fairs, and cold winters piled up in the chronicles. The causes are now ranked: clusters of volcanic eruptions first, deep solar minima second, sustained by sea-ice and ocean feedbacks. Its final act was a nineteenth-century volley of eruptions, Tambora among them, whose recovery blurred straight into the beginning of human-caused warming.

Why it matters

The Little Ice Age is the climate backdrop of half of modern history, from Norse Greenland's end to the famines and frost fairs of early modern Europe, and the standing proof that a degree or less, sustained, rearranges harvests and societies. It also complicates today's baseline: the 'pre-industrial' climate we measure warming against was itself recovering from volcanic winters. Climate history has no flat reference line, only chapters.

Dating & uncertainty

European reconstructions run the Little Ice Age from about 1250 to 1860, likely the coldest stretch of the past 8,000 years there, though a hemispheric definition of 1440 to 1920 is also defended and not all of it was cold. The drivers were clusters of volcanic eruptions and grand solar minima, amplified by sea ice and ocean feedbacks; the Maunder Minimum alone, analysis shows, does not explain it.

Sources

  1. Wanner et al. (2022), Quaternary Science Reviews · The variable European Little Ice Agedoi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2022.107531
  2. Owens et al. (2017), Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate · The Maunder minimum and the Little Ice Age: an update from recent reconstructions and climate simulationsdoi:10.1051/swsc/2017034
  3. Brönnimann et al. (2019), Nature Geoscience · Last phase of the Little Ice Age forced by volcanic eruptionsdoi:10.1038/s41561-019-0402-y

Our species’ history as one day

23:56:273 min 33 s before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day

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