The Little Ice Age was a period of cooling occurring after a warmer North Atlantic era known as the Medieval Warm Period. While not a true ice age, the term was introduced into scientific literature by François E. Matthes in 1939.Climatologists and historians working with local records no longer expect to agree on either the start or end dates of this period, which varied according to local conditions. Some confine the Little Ice Age to approximately the 16th century to the mid 19th century. 
It is generally agreed that there were three minima, beginning about 1650, about 1770, and 1850, each separated by slight warming intervals. It is not certain if the Little Ice Age was a global phenomenon. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describe areas affected by the Little Ice Age; "Evidence from mountain glaciers does suggest increased glaciation in a number of widely spread regions outside Europe prior to the 20th century, including Alaska, New Zealand and Patagonia (Grove and Switsur, 1994). However, the timing of maximum glacial advances in these regions differs considerably, suggesting that they may represent largely independent regional climate changes, not a globally-synchronous increased glaciation" with "a modest cooling of the Northern Hemisphere during this period of less than 1°C," and suggests that "current evidence does not support globally synchronous periods of anomalous cold or warmth over this timeframe, and the conventional terms of ‘Little Ice Age’ and Medieval Warm Period appear to have limited utility in describing trends in hemispheric or global mean temperature changes in past centuries. "" There is more recent evidence that a cold period in the time frame of the Little Ice Age occurred at several locations in the Southern Hemisphere
There is no agreed beginning year to the Little Ice Age, although there is a frequently referenced series of events preceding the known climatic minima. Starting in the 13th century, pack ice began advancing southwards in the North Atlantic, as did glaciers in Greenland. The three years of torrential rains beginning in 1315 ushered in an era of unpredictable weather in Northern Europe which did not lift until the 19th century. There is anecdotal evidence of expanding glaciers almost worldwide. In contrast, a climate reconstruction based on glacial length shows no great variation from 1600 to 1850, though it shows strong retreat thereafter.
For this reason, any of several dates ranging over 400 years may indicate the beginning of the Little Ice Age:
* 1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow
* 1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
* 1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315-1317
* 1550 for theorized beginning of worldwide glacial expansion
* 1650 for the first climatic minimum
* 1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
* 1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315-1317
* 1550 for theorized beginning of worldwide glacial expansion
* 1650 for the first climatic minimum
Among the earliest references to the coming climate change is an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles dated 1046: "And in this same year after the 2nd of February came the severe winter with frost and snow, and with all kinds of bad weather, so that there was no man alive who could remember so severe a winter as that, both through mortality of men and disease of cattle; both birds and fishes perished through the great cold and hunger."
The Little Ice Age brought colder winters to portions of Europe and North America. In the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, gradually engulfing farms and crushing entire villages. The River Thames and the canals and rivers of the Netherlands often froze over during the winter, and people skated and even held frost fairs on the ice. The first Thames frost fair was in 1607; the last in 1814, although changes to the bridges and the addition of an embankment affected the river flow and depth, hence the possibility of freezes. The freeze of the Golden Horn and the southern section of the Bosphorus took place in 1622. In 1658, a Swedish army marched across the Great Belt to Denmark to invade Copenhagen. The Baltic Sea froze over, enabling sledge rides from Poland to Sweden, with seasonal inns built on the way. The winter of 1794/1795 was particularly harsh when the French invasion army under Pichegru could march on the frozen rivers of the Netherlands, whilst the Dutch fleet was fixed in the ice in Den Helder harbour. In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor froze, allowing people to walk from Manhattan to Staten Island.
Sea ice surrounding Iceland extended for miles in every direction, closing that island’s harbors to shipping. The severe winters affected human life in ways large and small. The population of Iceland fell by half, but this was perhaps also due to fluorosis caused by the eruption of the volcano Laki in 1783.Iceland also suffered failures of cereal crops and people moved away from a grain-based diet. The Norse colonies in Greenland starved and vanished (by the 15th century) as crops failed and livestock could not be maintained through increasingly harsh winters, though Jared Diamond noted that they had exceeded the agricultural carrying capacity before then. In North America, American Indians formed leagues in response to food shortages. In south Europe, in Portugal, snow storms were much more frequent while today are rare. There are reports of heavy snows in the winters of 1665, 1744 and 1886.
In 1995, Herbert Lamb said that, in many years, "snowfall was much heavier than recorded before or since, and the snow lay on the ground for many months longer than it does today." Many springs and summers were outstandingly cold and wet, although there was great variability between years and groups of years. Crop practices throughout Europe had to be altered to adapt to the shortened, less reliable growing season, and there were many years of death and famine (such as the Great Famine of 1315–1317, although this may have been before the Little Ice Age proper). Viticulture entirely disappeared from some northern regions. Violent storms caused massive flooding and loss of life. Some of these resulted in permanent losses of large tracts of land from the Danish, German, and Dutch coasts.
The extent of mountain glaciers had been mapped by the late 19th century. In both the north and the south temperate zones of our planet, snowlines (the boundaries separating zones of net accumulation from those of net ablation) were about 100 m lower than they were in 1975. In Glacier National Park, the last episode of glacier advance came in the late 18th and early 19th century.In Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, large temperature excursions during the Little Ice Age (~1400–1900 AD) and the Medieval Warm Period (~800–1300 AD) possibly related to changes in the strength of North Atlantic thermohaline circulation.
Climate Collapse
... the world's carbon cycle ... of carbon dioxide (CO2 ) on an ... threats to the Earth as a whole. CO2 now at 327ppm. 1988: The world wakes up to the danger of climate change ...In Ethiopia and Mauritania, permanent snow was reported on mountain peaks at levels where it does not occur today. Timbuktu, an important city on the trans-Saharan caravan route, was flooded at least 13 times by the Niger River; there are no records of similar flooding before or since. In China, warm weather crops, such as oranges, were abandoned in Jiangxi Province, where they had been grown for centuries. Also, two periods of most frequent typhoon strikes in Guangdong coincide with two of the coldest and driest periods in northern and central China (AD 1660-1680, 1850-1880). In North America, the early European settlers also reported exceptionally severe winters. For example, in 1607-1608 ice persisted on Lake Superior until June. Antonio Stradivari, the famous violin maker, produced his instruments during the Little Ice Age. It has been proposed that the colder climate caused the wood used in his violins to be denser than in warmer periods, contributing to the tone of Stradivari’s instruments.
The Little Ice Age by anthropology professor Brian Fagan of the University of California at Santa Barbara, tells of the plight of European peasants during the 1300 to 1850 chill: famines, hypothermia, bread riots, and the rise of despotic leaders brutalizing an increasingly dispirited peasantry. In the late 17th century, writes Fagan, agriculture had dropped off so dramatically that "Alpine villagers lived on bread made from ground nutshells mixed with barley and oat flour." Finland lost perhaps a third of its population to starvation and disease. Burroughs (Weather, 1981) analyses the depiction of winter in paintings. He notes that this occurred almost entirely from 1565 to 1665, and was associated with the climatic decline from 1550 onwards.He claims that before this there were almost no depictions of winter in art, and hypotheses that the unusually harsh winter of 1565 inspired great artists to depict highly original images, and the decline in such paintings was a combination of the "theme" having been fully explored, and mild winters interrupting the flow of painting.
The famous winter paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (e.g. Hunters in the Snow) all appear to have been painted in 1565. Snow also dominates many village-scapes by the Pieter Brueghel the Younger, who lived from 1564 to 1638. Burroughs states that Pieter Brueghel the Younger "slavishly copied his father’s designs. The derivative nature of so much of this work makes it difficult to draw any definite conclusions about the influence of the winters between 1570 and 1600…".Dutch painting of the theme appears to begin with Hendrick Avercamp after the winter of 1608. There is then an interruption of the theme between 1627 and 1640, with a sudden return thereafter; this hints at a milder interlude in the 1630s. The 1640s to the 1660s cover the major period of Dutch winter painting, which fits with the known proportion of cold winters then. The final decline in winter painting, around 1660, does not coincide with an amelioration of the climate; Burroughs therefore cautions against trying to read too much into artistic output, since fashion plays a part. He notes that winter painting recurs around the 1780s and 1810s, which again marked a colder period.
Scottish painting and contemporary records demonstrate that curling and skating were formerly popular outdoor winter sports, but it is now seldom possible to curl outdoors in Scotland due to unreliable conditions. The revival of interest in painting such scenes as Raeburn’s Skating Minister may owe as much to the romantic movement, which favoured depictions of dramatic landscapes, as to any meaningful observation on climate.
Law Dome ice cores show lower levels of CO2 mixing ratios during 1550-1800 AD, leading investigators Etheridge and Steele to conjecture "probably as a result of colder global climate".
In Southern Africa, sediment cores retrieved from Lake Malawi show colder conditions between 1570 and 1820, suggesting the lake Malawi records "further support, and extend, the global expanse of the Little Ice Age."
A novel 3000 year temperature reconstruction method based on the rate of stalagmite growth in a cold cave in South Africa suggest a cold period from 1500-1800 "characterizing the South African Little Ice age"
Sediment cores (Gebra-1 and Gebra-2) in Bransfield Basin, Antarctic Peninsula, have neoglacial indicators by diatom and sea-ice taxa variations during the period of the Little Ice Age.
Paleosea-level data for the Pacific Islands suggest that sea level in the region fell, possibly in two stages, between A.D. 1270-1475. This was associated with a 1.5°C fall in temperature (determined from oxygen-isotope analysis) and an observed increase in El Niño frequency.
Borehole reconstructions from Australia suggest that, over the last 500 years, the 17th century was the coldest in that continent, although the borehole temperature reconstruction method does not show good agreement between the northern and southern hemispheres Tree ring data from Patagonia show cold episodes between 1270 and 1380 and from 1520 to 1670; periods contemporary with Little Ice Age events in the Northern Hemisphere
Although anecdotal, in 1675 the Spanish explorer Antonio de Vea entered San Rafael Lagoon through Río Témpanos (Spanish for Ice Floe River), without mentioning any ice floe, and stated that the San Rafael Glacier did not reach far into the lagoon. In 1766 another expedition noticed that the glacier did reach the lagoon and calved into large icebergs. Hans Steffen visited the area in 1898, noticing that the glacier penetrated far into the lagoon. Such historical records indicates a general cooling in the area between 1675 and 1898, and "The recognition of the Little Ice Age in Northern Patagonia, through the use of documentary sources, provides important, independent evidence for the occurrence of this phenomenon in the region.” . As of 2001, the border of the glacier has significantly retreated compared to the borders of 1675.
There is limited evidence about conditions in Australia, though lake records in Victoria suggest that conditions, at least in the south of the state, were wet and/or unusually cool. In the north of the continent the limited evidence suggests fairly dry conditions, while coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef show similar rainfall today but with less variability..
In the North Atlantic, sediments accumulated since the end of the last ice age, nearly 12,000 years ago, show regular increases in the amount of coarse sediment grains deposited from icebergs melting in the now open ocean, indicating a series of 1-2°C (2-4°F) cooling events recurring every 1,500 years or so. The most recent of these cooling events was the Little Ice Age. These same cooling events are detected in sediments accumulating off Africa, but the cooling events appear to be larger, ranging between 3-8°C (6-14°F).
During the period 1645–1715, in the middle of the Little Ice Age, there was a period of low solar activity known as the Maunder Minimum. A growing body of scientific evidence indicates that there is a very low understanding of the correlation between low sunspot activity and cooling temperatures. The Spörer Minimum has also been identified with a significant cooling period near the beginning of the Little Ice Age. Other indicators of low solar activity during this period are levels of the isotopes carbon-14 and beryllium-10..
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4 Responses to “Little Ice Age”
- # lia xon 07 Nov 2009 at 12:43 pmthanks sooo much or this! it really helped with my homework!!!
- # lia xon 07 Nov 2009 at 12:45 pmbtw…your information was EXACTLY what i was looking for…it was AWESOME!!! other websites i looked on never said the impacts on vegetation and people…they just said the boring side of it…pffftt…thank you soo much !
- # ravi kumar kajuruon 24 Apr 2010 at 8:42 amVery informative. the article depicts the various atmospheric conditions in the past, basic in which we can predict the future state of the dreadful atmosphere.
- # ravi kumar kajuruon 24 Apr 2010 at 8:43 amVery informative. the article depicts the various atmospheric conditions in the past, basic on which we can predict the future state of the dreadful atmosphere.
The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850
Global Warming: A Convenient Disguise
Source: http://www.mandyjo.net/?page_id=5781
Anti-Aging: Turn the Clock Back!
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