What is it about?
Why Vikings abandoned the Eastern Settlement in Greenland is still debated. We modeled ice growth and sea-level rise during their occupation of the settlement, and found that they experienced pervasive flooding. This inundation compounded the existing social, political, and environmental complications Vikings faced in Greenland.
Featured Image
Photo by Steinar Engeland on Unsplash
Why is it important?
We applied a state-of-the-art sea-level model that considers the physics of how Earth's surface and the ocean realistically change when ice melts or grows. This research presents an explanation for why sea-level counter-intuitively rose in the Viking Eastern Settlement when local ice grew. The rate of sea-level rise was up to six times higher than that of the 20th century.
Perspectives
Doing this research with the team of co-authors was such a pleasure because we all had the same goal - to bring the sea-level perspective to a long-standing archaeological problem. I'm uniquely positioned to provide better constraints on environmental change to archaeological research, and it's really rewarding to carry out interdisciplinary research that can add more context to these interesting lines of thought.
Marisa Borreggine
Harvard University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Sea-level rise in Southwest Greenland as a contributor to Viking abandonment, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, April 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2209615120.
You can read the full text:
Resources
What Happened to the Vikings in Greenland?
Interview with Harvard Magazine about the research article.
The Vikings abandoned Greenland due in part to sea-level rise, study finds
Press release from Penn State news about the article.
Why did Vikings leave Greenland?
Video of co-author, Richard Alley, talking about the new research from PNAS.
Vikings left Greenland after growing ice sheet caused sea level rise
Interview with New Scientist about the Viking sea-level rise research.
New explanation why the Vikings gave up Greenland
Interview with Der Standard about the new research.
Sea-Level Rise in Southwest Greenland as a Contributor to Viking Abandonment
Dataset accompanying the PNAS article.
Contributors
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