The settlement of Kashiarsk in Greenland was once the site of Blattarid, home to the Viking Leif Eriksson, whose statue guarded the area.
Cindy Hopkins/Alamy
Researchers have found that sea levels around Greenland rose more than 3.3 meters between 1000 and 1450 AD, contributing to the hardships of Viking settlers and the eventual abandonment of the island.
In 985 AD, Eric the Red founded a colony in Greenland after being banished from Iceland. At the time, the North Atlantic region was unusually warm – the so-called Medieval Warm Period – but after a major volcanic eruption in Indonesia in 1257, conditions were much more severe during the centuries known as the Little Ice Age. it got cold.
Harvard’s Marisa Boreggin and colleagues say it led to the expansion of the Greenland ice sheet, and the increased weight caused the land adjacent to the ice sheet to subside. The larger ice sheet also had more mass and therefore exerted a stronger gravitational pull on the waters around Greenland, and these two factors had about the same effect on sea levels there.
Growth in the Greenland ice sheet has trapped water during this time, resulting in a 7 mm decrease in global sea level, but other factors have resulted in a modest overall rise on average across the world. All of this contributed to her 3.3m climb around Greenland.
It was already known that the sea rose in Viking-inhabited Greenland, but Boregin’s team was the first to calculate the effect. Findings show that the coast has receded hundreds of meters and water has dampened more than 200 square kilometers of land and crashed into many farms and homes.
It must have had a great influence on the settlers. Boreginne says there is evidence that their diet migrated from land to sea.
Settlers, including Eric the Red’s son Leif Erikson, who sailed to North America some 500 years before Christopher Columbus, made farming more difficult, clashed with the Inuit people, and brought more elephant ivory to Europe. As we arrived, we were grappling with the colder weather, which reduced the demand for walrus ivory. By about 1450 all settlements had been abandoned.
“What we found was that sea-level rise really played a role in Viking abandonment,” Borreginne says. “But it wasn’t necessarily the biggest factor.”
The Greenland ice sheet is currently shrinking rapidly. Local sea levels around Greenland are already falling as the land rises as the effects of gravity weaken and the ice loses weight. Melting of the entire ice sheet there may soon become inevitable, but regional sea levels will drop by more than 100 meters over the next few centuries, while globally they will rise by an average of about 6 meters.
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