Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 19, 1994 TAG: 9405190112
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A: The Vikings weren't a bunch of dunces. They named the place Greenland because they were pulling a snow job, so to speak. Erik the Red was hyping the place. He needed settlers.
``It's the original Shady Acres,'' says Thomas McGovern, a professor of archaeology at Hunter College and an expert on the Viking Greenlanders.
The green patches of Greenland are not along the coast. They're up the valleys, in the inland fjords. The two-mile-thick ice sheet that covers the vast majority of Greenland creates a high pressure zone in the atmosphere (why ice would do this is something we can't figure) and this leads to clear skies and keeps Greenland sunny and relatively mild in those protected valleys. Along the frigid shore there's a much harsher climate.
What zapped the Vikings was climate change. New research shows that around the year 1311 the climate got suddenly and dramatically colder, enough to alter the growing season by a number of weeks. The ``Little Ice Age'' lasted until about 1850 when things warmed up again. (Some heretics say there would have been a full-fledged Ice Age by this time had it not been for the Industrial Revolution pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and enhancing the greenhouse effect. An intriguing thought! But it does sound more like an elaborate justification for polluting the environment.)
``This wasn't a change that happened gradually. It's not like going down an escalator, it's more like getting pushed out a window,'' says McGovern.
The Norse Greenlanders stuck it out, desperately building churches and overgrazing their lands, until sometime between 1450 and 1500, when their last settlement collapsed.
``They ate their dogs and then they left,'' says McGovern.
Why did Greenland's Eskimos (the Inuit we should say) survive and thrive?
Because they had better technology. They had the tools and the knowledge for hunting ring seals when times got tough. The Norse didn't hang out with the Inuit, and may have believed the Inuit to be practitioners of witchcraft, a crime for which the Norse didn't hesitate to burn one of their own at the stake. You might say the failure to be multicultural proved fatal to the Norse.
And that's why Greenland is now called, officially, Kalaallit Nunaat.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB