Cape Farewell, South Greenland — It is the fifth day of a voyage to southern Greenland, aboard Gary Comer’s 150-foot exploration vessel, TURMOIL. Ever since we arrived, we have been under the influence of a benign high-pressure dome of air with daily temperatures soaring into the mid 70s in cloudless blue marble skies. The barometer and weather-sat output tells us that the fair skies have now begun to slide off to the east prior to the arrival of a gale, so we intend to round Cape Farewell and hole up before the gale hits.
We are here in Greenland with three leading experts in global climate change research, Wally Broecker of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Laboratory; Richard Alley, a glaciologist from Penn State who worked on the Greenland ice core; and George Denton, one of the country’s great field geologists from the University of Maine. Gary Comer has for the past three years personally invested millions of dollars to support the Comer Fellows Program in Abrupt Climate Change. Ever since his startling voyage five years ago through the legendary but then ice-free Northwest Passage, Comer has witnessed abrupt changes in the Arctic environment and he thinks the rest of us, including those leading us in Washington, ought to wake up.
Our three scientific companions take short helicopter lifts to the southern edge of the vast Greenland ice sheet and the moraines around its periphery that dramatically catalog the rate of global warming here. The evidence is written in massive letters around the ice edge. Whether our energy-intensive industrial civilizations are causing global warming or not, the history of Greenland is clear evidence that abrupt climate change has repeatedly shocked the natural and human communities of this largest island on earth.
The most recent evidence of an abrupt climate change in Greenland concerns the fate of the Norse Viking settlers who lived here for more than 400 years and then suddenly disappeared sometime after 1410. The Norse sagas tell the story of Erik the Red, who was banished to Iceland after he murdered a romantic rival and then repeated his misdeed in Iceland and was again banished to parts unknown — whereupon he discovered, named and settled Greenland in 985. Arriving on Greenland’s southwest coast, Erik sailed his longboat 50 miles up a long, deep fjord and established a farm near the head of the fjord at Brattahlid. This became the center of the Vikings’ Eastern Settlement. Another group of settlers who left Iceland with Erik sailed further on and in the vicinity of Greenland’s present day capital, Nuuk on the western coast, established the so-called Western Settlement.
On Sunday, July 17, we broke off our geological investigations for side trips to Erik the Red’s farm at Brattahlid and Gardar where the Norse eventually built a cathedral in approximately 1300 when the population around Erik’s Eastern Settlement had reached 5000. Circling over the farm looking for a landing site, we are impressed by the amount of lush green pastureland with the hillsides speckled with sheep. When we land at the edge of Brattahlid, a friendly Inuit fellow waves us on to a grassy landing spot. It seems subtly ironic that it is an Inuit who greets us at Erik the Red’s abandoned farmstead, a member of a community of 30 or so Native sheep-herders and farmers who have survived and successfully adopted an updated version of Erik’s way of life.
Soon a guide materializes from nowhere and offers to show us around. Birgit, a Dane on a 3-month assignment from the Danish Museum, shows us over to a reconstructed long house and replica of the church that Erik’s wife, Thjodhild, built. Thjodhild became a Christian in the 990s after their son Leif returned from a trip to Norway where he converted to Christianity, and he promised the King he would convert the settlers of Greenland. Thjodhild apparently happily converted, but Erik refused, although he allowed her to build a church in the year 1000 as long as he didn’t have to see it from his own doorway. This replica of a small building that might seat 10 souls is at once a sweet and powerful reminder of the power of the simple symbol of the cross that helped pacify what were otherwise the quarrelsome and often murderous impulses of traditional Viking culture and its religion of Thor and Odin.
The symbolism and mystery of the Norse Viking settlements only deepens when we arrive at the next fjord to the east, Igaliko or Einar’s Fjord. There on the sloping sides of a lonely and virtually uninhabited fjord stand the lichen-encrusted ruins of a medieval stone cathedral perhaps 70 feet long and half as wide. All four walls and the keystone arch over what once was the sanctuary are still intact; only the wood and sod roof has collapsed on itself. Here the Bishop of Greenland presided. A series of smaller foundations 100 or so feet away lead into a “Great Hall” where festivals occurred and attached to it is a long house, storerooms, a pantry and perhaps a kitchen to support the novitiate.
What happened? What is known is that in 1408 a wedding was celebrated here at this cathedral, with the bride’s family arriving from Iceland. It must have been a great wedding party because they did not return to Iceland until two years later in 1410 whereupon the marriage was officially recorded.
Climate researchers, including Richard Alley who laboriously and carefully counted the annual rings in the two-mile Greenland ice core, notes that Northern Europe’s climate entered a generally cooler period beginning about 1300. The change appears to have been dramatic at the Viking Western Settlement around Nuuk where other researchers have concluded that a catastrophic abandonment occurred shortly after 1349 when word reached the bishop at Gardar that the Western Settlement was in great trouble. Two years later when they were able to get a boat there, the bishop’s men found only sheep and cattle wandering in the hills. The year 1350 is generally also the date that climatologists use as the beginning of the so-called Little Ice Age, a much colder period in northern Europe. This climate change followed the Medieval Warming, a 500-year-long period between 800 and 1300 when Greenland was much warmer that coincides with Erik and the bishop’s reigns.
Did climate change drive the Norse from Greenland, as writers such as Jared Diamond have concluded in his recent book, Collapse, or were other factors involved? Of course no one can be certain. But the stony ruins at Brattahild and Gardar now serve as silent reminders of how even modest changes can push communities over the edge into oblivion.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.