Vikings abandoned Greenland due in part to sea-level rise

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

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

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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.

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