Sea ice triggered the Little Ice Age, finds a new study

by University of Colorado at Boulder

The map shows Greenland and adjacent ocean currents. Colored circles show where some of the sediment cores used in the study were obtained from the seafloor. The small historical map from the beginning of the 20th century shows the distribution of Storis, or sea ice from the Arctic Ocean, which flows down the east coast of Greenland. The graphs show the reconstructed time series of changes in the occurrence of sea ice and polar waters in the past. The colors of the curves correspond to the locations on the map. The blue shading represents the period of increased sea ice in the 1300s. Credit: The figures are modified from Miles et al., 2020.

A new study finds a trigger for the Little Ice Age that cooled Europe from the 1300s through mid-1800s, and supports surprising model results suggesting that under the right conditions sudden climate changes can occur spontaneously, without external forcing.

The study, published in Science Advances, reports a comprehensive reconstruction of sea ice transported from the Arctic Ocean through the Fram Strait, by Greenland, and into the North Atlantic Ocean over the last 1400 years. The reconstruction suggests that the Little Ice Age—which was not a true ice age but a regional cooling centered on Europe—was triggered by an exceptionally large outflow of sea ice from the Arctic Ocean into the North Atlantic in the 1300s.

While previous experiments using numerical climate models showed that increased sea ice was necessary to explain long-lasting climate anomalies like the Little Ice Age, physical evidence was missing. This study digs into the geological record for confirmation of model results.

Researchers pulled together records from marine sediment cores drilled from the ocean floor from the Arctic Ocean to the North Atlantic to get a detailed look at sea ice throughout the region over the last 1400 years.

"We decided to put together different strands of evidence to try to reconstruct spatially and temporally what the sea ice was during the past one and a half thousand years, and then just see what we found," said Martin Miles, an INSTAAR researcher who also holds an appointment with NORCE Norwegian Research Centre and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Norway.

The cores included compounds produced by algae that live in sea ice, the shells of single-celled organisms that live in different water temperatures, and debris that sea ice picks up and transports over long distances. The cores were detailed enough to detect abrupt (decadal scale) changes in sea ice and ocean conditions over time.

The records indicate an abrupt increase in Arctic sea ice exported to the North Atlantic starting around 1300, peaking in midcentury, and ending abruptly in the late 1300s.

"I've always been fascinated by not just looking at sea ice as a passive indicator of climate change, but how it interacts with or could actually lead to changes in the climate system on long timescales," said Miles. "And the perfect example of that could be the Little Ice Age."


"This specific investigation was inspired by an INSTAAR colleague, Giff Miller, as well as by some of the paleoclimate reconstructions of my INSTAAR colleagues Anne Jennings, John Andrews, and Astrid Ogilvie," added Miles. Miller authored the first paper to suggest that sea ice played an essential role in sustaining the Little Ice Age.

Scientists have argued about the causes of the Little Ice Age for decades, with many suggesting that explosive volcanic eruptions must be essential for initiating the cooling period and allowing it to persist over centuries. One the hand, the new reconstruction provides robust evidence of a massive sea-ice anomaly that could have been triggered by increased explosive volcanism. One the other hand, the same evidence supports an intriguing alternate explanation.

Climate models called "control models" are run to understand how the climate system works through time without being influenced by outside forces like volcanic activity or greenhouse gas emissions. A set of recent control model experiments included results that portrayed sudden cold events that lasted several decades. The model results seemed too extreme to be realistic—so-called Ugly Duckling simulations—and researchers were concerned that they were showing problems with the models.

Miles' study found that there may be nothing wrong with those models at all.

"We actually find that number one, we do have physical, geological evidence that these several decade-long cold sea ice excursions in the same region can, in fact do, occur," he said. In the case of the Little Ice Age, "what we reconstructed in space and time was strikingly similar to the development in an Ugly Duckling model simulation, in which a spontaneous cold event lasted about a century. It involved unusual winds, sea ice export, and a lot more ice east of Greenland, just as we found in here." The provocative results show that external forcing from volcanoes or other causes may not be necessary for large swings in climate to occur. Miles continued, "These results strongly suggest...that these things can occur out of the blue due to internal variability in the climate system."

The marine cores also show a sustained, far-flung pulse of sea ice near the Norse colonies on Greenland coincident with their disappearance in the 15th century. A debate has raged over why the colonies vanished, usually agreeing only that a cooling climate pushed hard on their resilience. Miles and his colleagues would like to factor in the oceanic changes nearby: very large amounts of sea ice and cold polar waters, year after year for nearly a century.

"This massive belt of ice that comes streaming out of the Arctic—in the past and even today—goes all the way around Cape Farewell to around where these colonies were," Miles said. He would like to look more closely into oceanic conditions along with researchers who study the social sciences in relation to climate.


Explore further Increasing Arctic freshwater is driven by climate change

More information: Martin W. Miles et al, Evidence for extreme export of Arctic sea ice leading the abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age, Science Advances (2020). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aba4320
Journal information: Science Advances


Provided by University of Colorado at Boulder

 

Small climate changes can have devastating local consequences–it happened in the Little Ice Age

by Dagomar Degroot, The Conversation

Disastrous storms, like one in 1775 in the Netherlands, were documented by engravers 

and other artists. Credit: Noach van der Meer II, after Hendrik Kobell

In recent weeks, catastrophic floods overwhelmed towns in Germany and the Netherlands, inundated subway tunnels in China, swept through northwestern Africa and triggered deadly landslides in India and Japan. Heat and drought fanned wildfires in the North American West and Siberia, contributed to water shortages in Iran, and worsened famines in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.

Extremes like these are increasingly caused or worsened by human activities heating up Earth's climate. For thousands of years, Earth's climate has not changed anywhere near as quickly or profoundly as it's changing today.

Yet on a smaller scale, humans have seen waves of extreme weather events coincide with temperature changes before. It happened during what's known as the Little Ice Age, a period between the 14th and 19th centuries that was marked by large volcanic eruptions and bitter cold spells in parts of the world.

The global average temperature is believed to have cooled by less than a half-degree Celsius (less than 0.9 F) during even the chilliest decades of the Little Ice Age, but locally, extremes were common.

In diaries and letters from that period, people wrote about "years without a summer," when wintry weather persisted long after spring. In one such summer, in 1816, cold that followed a massive volcanic eruption in Indonesia ruined crops across parts of Europe and North America. Less well known are the unusually cold European summers of 1587, 1628 and 1675, when unseasonal frost provoked fear and, in some places, hunger.

"It is horribly cold," author Marie de Rabutin-Chantal wrote from Paris during the last of these years; "the behavior of the sun and of the seasons has changed."

Winters could be equally terrifying. People reported 17th-century blizzards as far south as Florida and the Chinese province of Fujian. Sea ice trapped ships, repeatedly enclosed the Chesapeake Bay and froze over rivers from the Bosporus to the Meuse. In early 1658, ice so completely covered the Baltic Sea that a Swedish army marched across the water separating Sweden and Denmark to besiege Copenhagen. Poems and songs suggest people simply froze to death while huddling in their homes.

These were cold snaps, not heat waves, but the overall story should seem familiar: A small global change in climate dramatically altered the likelihood of extreme local weather. Scholars who study the history of climate and society, like me, identify these changes in the past and find out how human populations responded.

Temperatures fell well below normal in parts of Europe in 1816. Credit: Dagomar Degroot, 

CC BY-ND

What's behind the extremes

We know about the Little Ice Age because the natural world is full of things like trees, stalagmites and ice sheets that respond to weather while growing or accumulating gradually over time. Specialists can use past fluctuations in their growth or chemistry as indicators of fluctuations in climate and thereby create graphs or maps—reconstructions—that show historical climate changes.

These reconstructions reveal that waves of cooling swept across much of the world. They also suggest likely causes—including a series of explosive volcanic eruptions that abruptly released sunlight-scattering dust into the stratosphere; and slow, internal variability in regional patterns of atmospheric and oceanic circulation.

These causes could only cool the Earth by a few tenths of a degree Celsius during the chilliest waves of the Little Ice Age, however. And the cooling was not nearly as consistent as present-day warming.

Small global trends can mask far bigger local changes. Studies have suggested that modest cooling created by volcanic eruptions can reduce the usual contrast between temperatures over land and sea, because land heats and cools faster than oceans. Since that contrast powers the monsoons, the African and East Asian summer monsoons can weaken after big eruptions. That likely disturbed atmospheric circulation all the way into the North Atlantic, reducing the flow of warm air into Europe. This is why parts of Western Europe, for example, may have cooled by more than 3 C (5.4 F) even as the rest of the world cooled far less during the 1816 year without a summer.

Feedback loops also amplified and sustained regional cooling, similar to how they amplify regional warming today. In the Arctic, for example, cooler temperatures can mean more, longer-lasting sea ice. Ice reflects more sunlight back into space than water does, and that feedback loop leads to more cooling, more ice and so on. As a result, the comparatively modest climate changes of the Little Ice Age likely had profound local impacts.

Changing patterns of atmospheric circulation and pressure also led in many regions to remarkably wet, dry or stormy weather.

Heavy sea ice in the Greenland Sea may have diverted the North Atlantic storm track south, funneling severe gales toward the dikes and dams of what are today the Netherlands and Belgium. Thousands of people succumbed in the 1570 All Saints' Day Flood along the German and Dutch coast, and again in the Christmas Flood of 1717. Heavy precipitation and water pooling behind dams of melting ice repeatedly overwhelmed inadequate flood defenses and inundated central and Western Europe. "Who would not take pity on the city?" one chronicler lamented after seeing his town under water and then on fire in 1602. "One storm, one flood, one fire destroyed it all."

Visualizing temperature anomalies over 2,000 years, with colder temperatures in darker

 blues and hotter temperatures in darker reds, shows the chilly periods of the Little Ice Age

 and the extreme warming of today. Credit: Ed Hawkins

Cooling sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean probably also diverted the rain-giving winds around the equator to the south, provoking droughts that undermined the water infrastructure of 15th-century Angkor.

Owing perhaps to the modest cooling of volcanic dust veils, disrupted patterns of atmospheric circulation led in the 16th century to severe droughts that contributed to food shortages across the Ottoman Empire. In 1640, the grand canal that supplied Beijing with food simply dried up, and a short but profound drought in 1666 primed the wooden infrastructure of European cities for a wave of catastrophic urban fires.

How does it apply to today?

Today, the temperature shift is going in the other direction—with global temperatures already 1 C (1.8 F) higher than before the industrial era, and local, sometimes devastating, extremes occurring around the world.

New research has found that extreme heat waves, those that don't just break records but shatter them, become more common when temperatures change rapidly.

These serve as a warning to governments to redouble their efforts to limit warming to 1.5 C (2.7 F), relative to the 20th-century average, while also investing in the development and deployment of technologies that filter greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

Restoring the chemistry of the atmosphere will still take many decades after countries bring down their greenhouse gas emissions, and so communities must adapt to a hotter and less habitable planet. Nations andcommunities might learn from some of the success stories of the Little Ice Age: Populations that prospered were often those that provided for their poor, established diverse trade networks, migrated from vulnerable environments, and above all adapted proactively to new environmental realities.

People who lived through the Little Ice Age lacked perhaps the most important resource available today: the ability to learn from the long global history of human responses to climate change.

What was the Medieval warm period?

Provided by The Conversation 

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

New Study Indicates North Atlantic Is Close to a “Tipping Point”

By UNIVERSITY OF EXETER OCTOBER 20, 2022

The findings indicate that, before the Little Ice Age, the North Atlantic climate system lost resilience and destabilized, potentially forcing it to “tip” into a new, colder state.

A Little Ice Age study reveals new information about the North Atlantic climate system.

Scientists have examined centuries-old clam shells to determine how the North Atlantic climate system reached a “tipping point” before the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age, a period of regional cooling that was particularly pronounced in the North Atlantic, lasted for many centuries and came to an end in about 1850.

A long-standing theory contends that the period’s initial cooling was maintained by “sea-ice to ocean feedbacks”; as the sea ice expanded, ocean currents slowed, which in turn decreased the flow of warm water from the south.

The University of Exeter conducted a new study that examined how the ocean has changed and responded to external changes over the last few centuries using the shells of quahog clams, which can survive for several hundred years.

Ocean quahog clam. Credit: Paul Kay

The results demonstrate that the North Atlantic climate system lost resilience (the ability to recover from external changes) and destabilized before the Little Ice Age, which may have caused it to “tip” into a new, colder state. Additionally, according to the experts, a new tipping point in the North Atlantic may be near, which has major consequences for the climate of the region.

The work aids in our understanding of how and when tipping points are triggered, which is important given that scientists have warned that many tipping points may now be approaching worldwide due to human-driven climate change.

“One way to tell that a system is approaching a sudden transition is that it becomes slow to respond to perturbations (external changes),” said lead author Beatriz Arellano-Nava, of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute. “In other words, a system loses the ability to return to its average state, and can instead ‘tip’ into a new state.”

“In the case of the North Atlantic prior to the Little Ice Age, this loss of resilience made the system vulnerable to an abrupt switch, potentially heralding the transition to Little Ice Age conditions,” said Dr. Paul Halloran, who co-led the research.

The new study warns that the vulnerability of the North Atlantic system is a critical issue today, with recent analysis suggesting it has destabilized during the last century and might be approaching a tipping point.

“Our latest analysis suggests that the system of ocean currents in the northern North Atlantic could be at risk of a tipping point again now due to global warming, leading once again to abrupt climate change over Europe,” said Professor Tim Lenton, Director of the Global Systems Institute.

Analysis of clam shells focussed on oxygen and carbon isotopes and shell growth – all of which can be used as measures of environmental variability.

Reference: “Destabilisation of the Subpolar North Atlantic prior to the Little Ice Age” by Beatriz Arellano-Nava, Paul R. Halloran, Chris A. Boulton, James Scourse, Paul G. Butler, David J. Reynolds, and Timothy M. Lenton, 25 August 2022, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-32653-x

The study was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

Little Ice Age study reveals North Atlantic reached a tipping point

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

 

IMAGE: OCEAN QUAHOG CLAM view more 

CREDIT: PAUL KAY

Scientists have used centuries-old clam shells to see how the North Atlantic climate system reached a "tipping point" before the Little Ice Age.

The Little Ice Age – a period of regional cooling, especially in the North Atlantic – lasted several centuries, ending in about 1850.

A long-standing theory suggests initial cooling in this period was sustained by "sea-ice to ocean feedbacks" – sea ice expanded and this slowed ocean currents which in turn reduced the flow of warm water from the south.

The new study, by the University of Exeter, used the shells of quahog clams – which can live for several hundred years – to understand how the ocean has evolved and responded to external changes over recent centuries.

The findings show that the North Atlantic climate system destabilised and lost resilience (the ability to recover from external changes) prior to the Little Ice Age, possibly causing it to "tip" into a new, colder state.

And the researchers say the North Atlantic could be approaching a new tipping point, with major consequences for the region's climate.

With scientists warning that multiple tipping points may now be approaching worldwide due to human-driven climate change, the study helps us understand when and how tipping points are triggered.

"One way to tell that a system is approaching a sudden transition is that it becomes slow to respond to perturbations (external changes)," said lead author Beatriz Arellano-Nava, of Exeter's Global Systems Institute.

"In other words, a system loses the ability to return to its average state, and can instead 'tip' into a new state."

"In the case of the North Atlantic prior to the Little Ice Age, this loss of resilience made the system vulnerable to an abrupt switch, potentially heralding the transition to Little Ice Age conditions" said Dr Paul Halloran, who co-led the research.

The new study warns that vulnerability of the North Atlantic system is a critical issue today, with recent analysis suggesting it has destabilised during the last century and might be approaching a tipping point.

"Our latest analysis suggests that the system of ocean currents in the northern North Atlantic could be at risk of a tipping point again now due to global warming, leading once again to abrupt climate change over Europe," said Professor Tim Lenton, Director of the Global Systems Institute.

Analysis of clam shells focussed on oxygen and carbon isotopes and shell growth – all of which can be used as measures of environmental variability.

The study was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

The paper, published in the journal Nature Communications, is entitled: "Destabilisation of the Subpolar North Atlantic prior to the Little Ice Age."

Climate tipping points – and the power of "positive tipping points" to tackle the climate crisis – are being discussed at a conference in Exeter this week (12-14 September). To find out more, visit: https://global-tipping-points.org/

---

JOURNAL

Nature Communications

DOI

10.1038/s41467-022-32653-x 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Destabilisation of the Subpolar North Atlantic prior to the Little Ice Age

The Coming Climate Crisis

The Little Ice Age could offer a glimpse of our tumultuous future.

BY AMITAV GHOSH

Firefighters try to control a blaze as it spreads toward the towns of Douglas City and Lewiston in California on July 31, 2018. (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

Over the last couple of decades, as the impact of global warming has intensified, the discussion of climate change has spilled out of the scientific and technocratic circles within which it was long confined. Today, the subject has also become an important concern in the humanities and arts.

Discussions of climate tend to focus on the future. Yet even scientific projections depend crucially on the study of the past: Proxy data, such as tree rings, pollen deposits, and ice cores, have proved indispensable for the modeling of the future impact of climate change. Based on evidence of this kind, scientists can tell us a great deal about how trees, glaciers, and sea levels will respond to rising temperatures.

But what about the political and social impact of global warming? What effects might a major shift in climate have on governments, public institutions, warfare, and belief systems? For answers to these questions, we have to turn to history (keeping in mind that historical inferences are necessarily impressionistic).

Of course, there has never been anything directly comparable to the current cycle of human-induced global warming. But there have been several periods, now intensely studied by historians, during which climate has drastically shifted, either locally or globally.

Perhaps the most intensively researched of these periods is the Little Ice Age, which reached its peak between the late 15th and early 18th centuries. This early modern era is of particular interest because some of the most important geopolitical processes of our own time trace back to it. This was the period, for example, when the first stages of globalization were inaugurated. It was also in this period that great-power conflicts began to be conducted on a global scale. The struggles for supremacy among the Spanish, Dutch, and British that unfolded during the Little Ice Age were thus the precursors of the strategic rivalries of the 20th and 21st centuries.

[Stephen Hawking’s insights about the universe were profound—but his insights into humanity were even more important, Carlo Rovelli writes.]

During part of the Little Ice Age, decreased solar irradiance and increased seismic activity resulted in temperatures that, as Geoffrey Parker writes in Global Crisis, a groundbreaking global history of the period, were “more than 1 [degree Celsius] cooler than those of the later twentieth century.”

The current cycle of human-induced global warming is likely to lead to a much greater climatic shift than that of the Little Ice Age.

The current cycle of human-induced global warming is likely to lead to a much greater climatic shift than that of the Little Ice Age.

 What is striking then is the sheer magnitude of the ecological, social, and political upheavals of the era.

Droughts struck many parts of the world—including Mexico, Chile, the Mediterranean Sea basin, west and central Africa, India, China, and Indonesia—frequently bringing famine in their wake. These disasters were often accompanied by mass uprisings, rebellions, and war. England endured the greatest internal upheaval in its history, Europe was convulsed by the Thirty Years’ War, and China was torn by decades of strife following the overthrow of the Ming dynasty. Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India, and the Russian and Spanish empires were all shaken by rebellions. And from England to China, millenarian sects sprang up, seized by visions of apocalypse.

Parker estimates that in the 17th century “more wars took place around the world than in any other era.” So terrible was the devastation that contemporary observers around the world produced similar records of famine, plague, and death. One French abbess, for example, believed that the global population declined by a third.

But some states still thrived, most notably the Dutch Republic, which became the world’s preeminent naval and financial power. According to Dagomar Degroot, the author of The Frigid Golden Age, the Dutch owed their success in no small part to their flexibility in adapting to the changed environmental conditions of the period. Moreover, the Dutch status as an emergent power gave them an advantage in relation to the Spanish empire, which was weighed down by its size and historical legacy.

What lessons can be drawn from this history for our own time?

The first is that the sensitivity of human societies to climatic factors may exceed all expectations. The sensitivity of human societies to climatic factors may exceed all expectations.Climate-related conflicts and displacements are already changing the political complexion of many of the world’s most important countries, most notably in Europe. Ten years ago, few would have predicted the extent to which immigration would become the spark for political upheavals across Europe and the Americas.

Second, the history of the Little Ice Age suggests that, apart from catalyzing all manner of political and economic crises, a major climatic shift would also affect the global order, favoring those who are best able to adapt to changing conditions. Whether these conditions favor emergent powers will depend on the degree to which the status quo powers of our time are impeded by their historical legacy, as the Spanish empire was.

In this way, the legacies of the carbon economy may themselves prove to be major impediments. Fossil fuels are much more than mere sources of energy; they have also engendered a wide array of cultural and social practices. Fossil fuel use has shaped the physical, cultural, and imaginative landscapes of the United States, Canada, and Australia to such a degree that significant sections of their populations remain psychologically and politically resistant to recognizing changing environmental realities.

Similarly, fossil fuels—oil and natural gas in particular—have shaped the United States’ strategic commitments in ways that may also hinder its ability to adapt. One example of this is the long-standing U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia, which has proved as much a constraint as an asset, especially regarding a transition to renewable energy.

[The laggards in the race for AI face grave dangers, Yuval Noah Harari writes.]

To the same degree that these legacy commitments serve to impede the adaptive abilities of the United States (and the West in general), they also serve as incentives for emergent powers to adapt as quickly as possible. For Beijing, a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is desirable not only for ecological and economic reasons but also because it could effectively set China free from an energy regime in which the rules were largely set by Western powers and their allies.

There are, of course, very significant limits to what can be extrapolated from history, not least because the great powers of the past did not possess weapons that could destroy the (human) world many times over. The crucial question for the future is whether the established and emergent powers of our time will be able to manage their rivalries even as their own populations become increasingly subject to the disruptive and destabilizing effects of climate change. If not, then human beings could bring about a catastrophe that would far exceed anything wrought by the warming of the planet.

This article originally appeared in the Winter 2019 issue of Foreign Policy magazine.

Amitav Ghosh is the author of The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Twitter: @GhoshAmitav

Amitav Ghosh

WRITER

Amitav Ghosh is best known for his intricate works of historical fiction, often set in or around his native India. But his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, is a searing piece of nonfiction that questions why writers and artists consistently fail to use environmental disasters as centerpieces in their stories. Ghosh blames these omissions for the lack of public will to confront climate change—a point he tirelessly reiterates in speeches around the world.

Lauren Tamaki illustration for Foreign Policy

These Paintings Reveal How the Dutch Adapted to Extreme Weather During the Little Ice Age

Artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hendrick Avercamp documented locals’ resilience in the face of freezing winters and food shortages

During the Little Ice Age, which spanned roughly 1250 to 1860, average global temperatures dropped by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

 Illustration by Meilan Solly / Photos via Wikimedia Commons

HISTORY | JANUARY 30, 2024 
Tim Brinkhof

On the afternoon of January 2, 1565, an iceberg drifted down the harbor of Delfshaven, a fishing village in the Netherlands. According to the inscription on a 16th-century oil painting of the event, the block of ice measured nearly 20 feet tall and 230 feet wide—large enough to cut off the village’s access to the Nieuwe Maas River. No fishers would have been looking to set sail that day, though, as the water was completely frozen over, with boats great and small trapped in the ice.

The fact that artist Cornelis Jacobsz van Culemborch commemorated this iceberg’s arrival with a painting suggests it was not a regular occurrence. Dutch winters were cold, but they were rarely this unforgiving. As it happened, the year 1565 fell in the middle of the Little Ice Age (LIA), a period of widespread cooling that spanned roughly 1250 to 1860. Average global temperatures dropped by as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, possibly due to a combination of volcanic eruptions and a reduction in solar activity.

Cornelis Jacobsz van Culemborch's painting of an iceberg that appeared in Delfshaven in January 1565 

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons


The LIA manifested in a variety of ways. “Many [Dutch people] died in floods that were partly caused by severe storms,” says Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University and the author of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age and the Dutch Republic, 1560-1720. “Others froze to death in bitterly cold winters.” Some parts of the world saw frequent flooding, while others suffered from persistent drought. Glaciers expanded; certain pathogens spread more readily; and icebergs floated to regions that had not seen them since the last glacial period (popularly called the Ice Age), which ended more than 11,500 years ago, before the birth of civilization.

Researchers have long been interested in how early modern societies adapted to the changes wrought by the LIA. Written accounts can certainly provide insight into this period of global cooling. Reporting from Paris in 1675, author Marie de Rabutin-Chantal wrote, “It is horribly cold. … The behavior of the sun and of the seasons has changed.” Nine years later, in January 1684, English diarist John Evelyn noted, “The frost continuing more and more severe, the Thames before London was still planted with booths in formal streets, all sorts of shops and trades furnished and full of commodities.”

Frost Fair on the Thames, With Old London Bridge in the Distance, unknown artist, 1684 Yale Center for British Art

But an especially rich source of information on the LIA is art. A 1684 painting by an unknown artist, titled Frost Fair on the Thames, With Old London Bridge in the Distance, illustrates the festival that Evelyn described. Italian artist Gabriel Bella, meanwhile, depicted the frozen canals of Venice in 1708. Other paintings and etchings of the Mediterranean city-state indicate its lagoon froze over at least twice more in the 18th century, in 1789 and 1791.

Even artworks that don’t center on climate anomalies can offer clues about the LIA. Scholars have used paintings of Venice’s historic architecture to track rising sea levels by comparing the positions of algal bands along the buildings’ walls then and now. A 2010 study of a 1571 painting by Paolo Veronese, who likely employed a camera obscura to ensure proportional accuracy, concluded that the sea level outside of the Coccina family’s palace was roughly 30 inches lower at the time than it is at present.

The Madonna of the Coccina Family, Paolo Veronese, 1571 

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Pieter Bruegel the Elder and the Little Ice Age

The LIA coincided with a period of great religious and political upheaval. In the aftermath of the 16th-century Protestant Reform

ation, Northern European artists slowly abandoned Christian imagery of heaven and hell in favor of the here and now. In Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, portraits of kings and saints gave way to paintings of parents and children, soldiers and workers, street scenes, and landscapes.

Dutch artists were especially celebrated for their commitment to realism. In 1882, French painter Eugène Fromentin declared Dutch art a “faithful, exact, complete” representation of the country’s culture; a century later, art historian Svetlana Alpers characterized Northern European painting as “an art of describing” reality, distinct from the narrative art of the Italian Renaissance. Johannes Vermeer’s The Little Street (circa 1658), for example, shows touched-up cracks in the bricklaying of a building in Delft—likely a scar from the 1654 gunpowder explosion that devastated the city and killed one of Rembrandt’s most gifted students, Carel Fabritius.

The Little Street, Johannes Vermeer, circa 1568 

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As a genre of painting, winter scenes hardly existed in Europe before the LIA. This was partly because harsh winters like the one immortalized by van Culemborch were, at best, once-in-a-lifetime experiences. “The medieval world …. had been much warmer,” with Vikings settling in Greenland and grapes growing as far north as southern England, writes author Benjamin Moser in The Upside-Down World: Meetings With the Dutch Masters. He points out that Europe’s “first notably cold winter” took place in 1564 and 1565, when that iceberg made its way to Delfshaven.

The frost stretched from Rotterdam to Brussels, where its effects were documented by Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his painting Hunters in the Snow (Winter). (Art historians use the term “Flemish” to refer to Flemish-speaking towns in the medieval Low Countries, which included parts of modern-day Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and Germany.) Part of a series depicting the seasons, the image captures the hardships of the LIA, especially when compared with other hunting scenes of the time. As journalist Harmen van Dijk writes for Dutch newspaper Trouw, “The hunters do not seem to have had any luck, returning with one little fox. Not exactly a feast. The innkeepers are trying to get a fire going. They might have some food, though that dilapidated sign outside doesn’t look promising.”

Hunters in the Snow (Winter), Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565 

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The LIA confronted the Dutch with challenges they had never faced before. In the Low Countries, rivers and canals were used to transport goods; when they froze, entire villages were cut off from maritime trade. Food shortages were common, and timber was in such short supply that in the winter of 1564 to 1565, a single bushel sold for two weeks’ wages. Households unable to afford these exorbitant prices had no choice but to look for fuel in unexpected places, tearing apart the gallows of their town squares or, if those had already been burned up, their own floorboards.

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Hunters in the Snow contrasts the hard-working hunters with a group of carefree ice skaters playing in the background. Another Bruegel painting, Winter Landscape With Skaters and Bird Trap, also from 1565, lacks this explicit juxtaposition but delivers a similar message through its subject matter. At a time when birds were considered “symbols of the soul,” wrote art historians Linda and George Bauer in a 1984 journal article, the work’s winter setting appeared deliberate, with the skaters representing “the dangerous progress of the soul as it passes through the world.”

Winter Landscape With Skaters and Bird Trap, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Hendrick Avercamp and the Little Ice Age

Bruegel’s moralizing tone—a kind of visual representation of the expression “walking on thin ice”—differs from that of later Dutch and Flemish landscape painters like Hendrick Avercamp, who was active in the early 17th century. If Bruegel’s winters appear harsh and cold, Avercamp’s are warm and fuzzy, both in color and in atmosphere. Sidelining seasonal hardship, his paintings almost exclusively show people enjoying themselves as they skate, sled or play an early form of ice hockey called ijskolf. As Moser writes in The Upside-Down World, “They show a merry Christmassy world of funnily dressed people disporting themselves on frozen canals: paintings I knew from jigsaw puzzles and holiday cards.”

These pleasant scenes may have been shaped by Avercamp’s own experiences: Moser records the oft-repeated possibility that the painter, who was probably born deaf and mute, romanticized an environment he was forced to observe from a distance. But the works also have their roots in history. Avercamp was born in 1585—three years before the Dutch Republic (consisting of seven northern Netherlandish provinces) won independence from Spain in a long and brutal war—and he died in 1634. Over the course of the painter’s life, the republic developed into one of the world’s most powerful and prosperous nations.

Winter Landscape With Skaters, Hendrick Avercamp, circa 1608 

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Degroot argues that the republic’s successes were, in part, a result of the LIA. “Increased precipitation hampered Spanish invasions,” he says, “while changes in atmospheric circulation helped Dutch fleets to sail into battle with the wind behind them, an important tactical advantage in the age of sail. Dutch farmers, sailors, soldiers, entrepreneurs and inventors also found ways to cope with—and even exploit—otherwise disastrous weather.”

Shipwrights, for example, greased and fortified the hulls of their vessels, allowing them to slide past ice. Ice-breaking boats kept domestic waterways open in times of persistent frost and helped maintain a steady supply of ice for wine cellars.

But developments during the LIA weren’t all positive. “Dutch people also suffered from extreme weather that can now be connected to the Little Ice Age,” Degroot says. During bitterly cold winters, “rivers froze over that would otherwise have protected the republic from invasion, and hostile armies took advantage.” Ultimately, the historian concludes, “The Little Ice Age offered more benefits than drawbacks for the republic, but the same cannot be said for many of its citizens.”

Enjoying the Ice Near a Town, Hendrick Avercamp, 1620

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Bustling compositions like Avercamp’s Winter Landscape With Ice Skaters document not only the republic’s increasing resilience but also its growing disregard for traditional social hierarchies. “Frozen water was like carnival,” Moser writes, “an upside-down world when, for a few days, the conventions of daily life relaxed.” The polymath Hugo Grotius, a contemporary of Avercamp, agreed. “Here nobody speaks of rank,” he wrote in a poem, “here we are open and free; here the farm girl joins with the nobleman.” In time, this upside-down world would no longer be restricted to the ice.

Avercamp’s unceasing production of winter landscapes—he hardly painted anything else, leaving behind around 100 such scenes—cemented the season and its corresponding activities as a central aspect of burgeoning Dutch national identity. Today, his paintings provide snapshots of a climate that is gradually disappearing from living memory due to global warming.

“These paintings already have a nostalgic quality to them,” Moser tells Smithsonian magazine, “of sadness or loss,” particularly among Dutch people who grew up skating outdoors. “These images are over 400 years old, and the people in them look different, but we connect to them because we went outside and did the same things they did when we were kids. Now, they are the skeletons of dinosaurs.”


Tim Brinkhof | READ MORE
Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch journalist who covers art, culture and history. He studied comparative literature at New York University and has written for Vox, Vulture, Big Think, JSTOR Daily, Jacobin, New Lines and more.