The Little Ice Age

• 1250 - the Atlantic pack ice starts to grow
  
• 1300 - Europeans can't always depend on a warm summer
  
• 1550 - glaciers expand worldwide
  
• 1645-1715 - Maunder minimum (little sunspot activity recorded, very cold temperatures)
  
• 1816 - Year Without a Summer
  
• 1860s - Earth Warms Up

The Little Ice Age changed the way that people lived their lives. During the Medieval Warm Period that occurred right before the Little Ice Age, people were able to grow grapes as far north as England. That all changed, as the summer growing period shortened and the winters became colder. Rivers such as the Thames would freeze over. Between 1607 and 1814, the English regularly held a frost fair on the frozen river Thames. There would be puppet shows, races, and sledding. The Frost Fair did not happen every year, but the River Thames did freeze over at least 24 times in the London area during the Little Ice Age.

The Delaware had chunks of ice when George Washington crossed it, which made the crossing of the river more dangerous. New York Harbor froze over in 1780. Skating on the ice was common back in these cold winters.

Life during the Little Ice Age was difficult. The cold weather shortened the growing season, and assisted in the growth of molds and fungi that destroyed crops. The cold winters would sometimes cause livestock to die. Wild animals also suffered from the weather. Peasants worked hard on the land, and could barely eke out a living. Crops sometimes failed entirely, and famine would result.

Many historians attribute the difficult life during the Middle Ages to the fall of the Roman Empire and the loss of civilization. While the fall of the Roman Empire did contribute to a loss of knowledge, the difficulty of growing crops and the amount of time that had to be spent on food production led to little free time that could be spent on education.

Over time, people started to adapt to the climate, and learned new ways of dealing with the weather. They started to grow new crops, like barley, that would grow better during the colder weather.

The Mongols made most of their raids during the Medieval Warm Period. They opened up the Silk Road, which was still open during the first part of the Little Ice Age. Over this land route to Asia, goods such as silks and spices traveled from Asia. Another more unwanted visitor came from Asia: plague.

The Little Ice Age affected China as well as Europe. In some places that used to grow oranges, the crops had to change. The Ming Dynasty overthrew the Yuan Dynasty after plague hit the Yangtze river valley in the 1340s, which caused the death of 50% of the population in some places. As these people died, there wasn't enough resources to maintain the river dikes, which caused flooding and further deaths. This led to peasant revolts; one peasant, Zhu Yuanzhang, took advantage of these circumstances, overthrew the Mongols, and established the Ming Dynasty.

From Asia, the plague spread to Europe, where the disease hit malnourished peasants hard. The plague was at its height in Europe between 1347 and 1351. England and France were already embroiled in what would become the Hundred Year's War. Had war and famine not already weakened the population, the plague might not have hit so hard. The plague continued to recur throughout the Little Ice Age.

Had the Little Ice Age not occurred, the history of the new world might have been different. Lief Ericsson sailed to the Americas 1000 years ago. This was during the Medieval Warm Period. When he landed in what is present-day Newfoundland, he called it Vineland, meaning "land of the grapes". When John Cabot rediscovered Newfoundland in 1497, the Little Ice Age had begun, and the weather was so cold, the fishermen that would set up villages there would only stay for the summer.

When the Little Ice Age occurred, food sources started to dry up. Crops started to fail. It became impossible to fish because the seas were frozen for part of the year. The Vikings had to migrate to places like France and England. The population of the area declined by more than 50% during the Little Ice Age.

Not everything about the Little Ice Age was bad. Some of the best sounding instruments in the world, made by Antonio Stradivari, were made during this time period. The sound of these instruments has never been able to be reproduced, even with all our modern technology. Many believe that without the cold temperatures, he would have never been able to make such fantastic instruments.

Stradivari lived during the Maunder Minimum, from 1644 to 1737. The Maunder Minimum was a period of time with almost no sunspot activity, and provided some of the coldest years of the Little Ice Age. During these cold years, trees grew much more slowly, and the wood was much denser as a result. Stradivari made his violins, cellos, violas, and guitars out of this wood. Some believe that the density of the wood during this time period contributed to the superior sound that his instruments had.

Many instrument makers today make the best quality violins from cold-climate wood, or trees that have been otherwise grown so that the wood produced is denser.

During the early part of the Age of Exploration, Spain was the country that seemed to rule the world. That would change in 1588, when England defeated the Spanish Armada. While English tactics had a part to play in the victory, weather played a huge role in the decimation of the Spanish fleet.

The Spanish Armada left on May 28 with 151 ships. Bad weather delayed the armada, and forced some of the ships to leave before the battle even began. In August, the English defeated the Spanish Armada. Spain would have been able to fight another day, but as it sailed around England on its way back home, the weather destroyed even more ships. Only 67 ships and 10,000 men ended up returning to Spain. More ships were lost due to the weather than to fighting. Some of the sailors that did return ended up dying in Spain.

1816 was known as "The Year Without a Summer" or "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death". The world was already in the middle of the Little Ice Age, but a volcanic eruption on Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 would make things worse.

In New England, crops were killed by frost in May. It snowed on June 6th. Ice was found in the lakes and rivers of Pennsylvania in July and August. At times, the temperature would be around 95ºF, but would drop almost to freezing within hours. Food prices rose around the world. Crops failed in New England and Europe, and in China, flooding destroyed many crops.

Crop failures caused some New England farmers to move out west.

In Europe, some artists were able to take advantage of the cold weather and produce work that remains today. Mary Shelley and John William Polidori were on vacation with their friends in Switzerland, but the weather forced them to stay indoors, so they decided to have a contest on who could write the scariest story. The result was Shelly's Frankenstein and Polidori's The Vampyre. Lord Byron was inspired to write his poem "Darkness" from the weather.

While it's normally pretty hot in the Southwest today, especially during the summers, during the Little Ice Age, the weather could get pretty cold. In 1540, a winter storm on the border of New Mexico and Arizona delayed Coronado's conquistadors for ten days. Pedro de Castañeda, who chronicled the event, noted that "the horses stood half buried in [the snow]." In 1775, Juan Bautista de Anza led an expedition of Spanish colonists in Southern California. He remarked in his diary that "several persons were frozen to the point of being in danger of death." In the winter of 1846, the Rio Grande had ice in it. While the Southwest does have cool winters today, in the places that snow was seen during the Little Ice Age, even a dusting of snow would be odd.*

* We did see snow twice in Phoenix Arizona in the winter of 2010-11! It was actually graupel (which is like semi-melted hail) but we were throwing snowballs. Are we entering another little ice age?

The Little Ice Age affected the paintings of the era. There were many paintings of the time that depicted winter scenes, such as the frozen-over Thames River. Outdoor scenes reflected the cooler climate. In 1970, more than 12,000 paintings from the time period between 1400 and 1967 were studied. The blueness of the sky, cloudiness of the scene, and darkness of the painting was studied. He divided the paintings up into three groups: 1400-1549, 1550-1849, and 1850-1967. The middle period, 1550-1849, corresponded to the height of the Little Ice Age; there also were fewer paintings with blue skies, the paintings were darker, and the paintings were cloudier.

While Al Gore and his friends seem to be in a tizzy over possible global warming, it may make sense to look for the exact opposite. Are we headed towards global cooling? Some people believe that we may be.

When I initially wrote this page, I read an article about how sunspot activity was dramatically slowing down. You may recall in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a great deal of sunspot activity going on. There was so much sunspot activity at times that it disrupted satellite transmission and television coverage. This was also during the time period where global warming activists started becoming alarmed that the earth was getting too hot. Scientists at the National Solar Observatory believe that sunspot activity may reduce to zero by 2015.

Some of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age were also the years with the least amount of sunspot activity. The Frost Fair and Stradivarius violins were made during the Maunder Minimum, and temperatures were extremely cold. The Year Without a Summer occurred during the Dalton Minimum. Conversely, during the time of the Medieval Warm period, sunspot activity was at an all-time high.

Over the past couple of years, I have noticed colder temperatures in places that normally don't see that kind of weather. I remember joking about "global warming" causing snow in Iraq about a year ago. New York City received a lot of cold weather last year. When I visited my parents in Washington State in 2007, snow on the ground was bountiful. In 2008, it also snowed on Christmas. They received over a foot of snow, an event so unusual I wrote a news story on the Christmas snow. I lived in Western Washington for 18 years, and prior to 2007, not once did I ever experience snow on Christmas. Historically, the weather forecasters say that there is a 0% chance of a foot of snow on Christmas day, but it happened in 2008. In 2010 they had a mild winter, but it snowed on Easter.

On December 30th, 2010, it snowed in Phoenix.

I'm not sure whether we will have another Little Ice Age or not, but if the sunspot activity is halting, it looks like we could be headed in that direction.