Latest Little Ice Age Stories
As the Sun enters a period of low solar activity over the next 50 years, new research has calculated the probability of unusually cold winter temperatures occurring in the UK.Last year, the same group of researchers, from the University of Reading, linked colder winters in Europe to low solar activity and predicted that the Sun is moving into a particularly low period of activity, meaning the UK will experience more cold winters in the future "“ potentially similar to those experienced in...
The end of the Norse colonies on Greenland have long been shrouded in mystery, and while archaeologists have been able to fill in some blanks, there is limited written evidence of the colony's demise in the 14th and early 15th century. But now, new research from Brown University suggests that Greenland's early Viking settlers lived in a region with a rapidly changing climate with temperatures plunging several degrees on average in a span of decades. Climate scientists have been able to...
A sediment core from a South American lake revealed a steady, sharp drop in crucial monsoon rainfall since 1900, leading to the driest conditions in 1,000 years as of 2007 and threatening tropical populations with water shortages, a team from Pitt, Union College, and SUNY-Albany reports in PNAS A 2,300-year climate record University of Pittsburgh researchers recovered from an Andes Mountains lake reveals that as temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rise, the planet's densely populated...
Combination of hi-tech models and paleo-records may hold key to unlocking reason for Anastazi people's migration and other global eventsIn the time before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a cooler central Pacific Ocean has been connected with drought conditions in Europe and North America that may be responsible for famines and the disappearance of cliff dwelling people in the American West.A new study from the University of Miami (UM) has found a connection between La Niña-like sea surface...
The seriousness of current global warming is underlined by a reconstruction of climate at Maxwell Bay in the South Shetland Islands of the Antarctic Peninsula over approximately the last 14,000 years, which appears to show that the current warming and widespread loss of glacial ice are unprecedented."At no time during the last 14 thousand years was there a period of climate warming and loss of ice as large and regionally synchronous as that we are now witnessing in the Antarctic...
U.S. geoscientists say they've found evidence that northern hemisphere climate swings during the past 12,000 years are linked to changes in the tropics. University of New Hampshire and Columbia University scientists said their finding suggests a prolonged cold spell caused European and North American glaciers to creep forward several hundred years ago, possibly affecting climate patterns as far south as Peru and causing tropical glaciers to also expand. Glaciers in both the tropics and North...
A new study that reports precise ages for glacial moraines in southern Peru links climate swings in the tropics to those of Europe and North America during the Little Ice Age approximately 150 to 350 years ago. The study, published this week in the journal Science, "brings us one step closer to understanding global-scale patterns of glacier activity and climate during the Little Ice Age," says lead author Joe Licciardi, associate professor of Earth sciences at the University of New...
A new 2,000-year-long reconstruction of sea surface temperatures (SST) from the Indo-Pacific warm pool (IPWP) suggests that temperatures in the region may have been as warm during the Medieval Warm Period as they are today.The IPWP is the largest body of warm water in the world, and, as a result, it is the largest source of heat and moisture to the global atmosphere, and an important component of the planet's climate. Climate models suggest that global mean temperatures are particularly...
New research, which reconstructs the extent of ice in the sea between Greenland and Svalbard from the 13th century to the present indicates that there has never been so little sea ice as there is now. The research results from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, are published in the scientific journal, Climate Dynamics.There are of course neither satellite images nor instrumental records of the climate all the way back to the 13th century, but nature has its own 'archive' of the climate...
According to a paper in this week's issue of the journal Science, the vast majority of the world's glaciers are retreating as the planet gets warmer. For the last 7,000 years, New Zealand's largest glaciers have moved out of step with glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, showing strong regional variations in climate, the paper reported. "This research should provide much more accurate reconstructions of glacial advances worldwide, allowing us in turn to make climate models more...
