Why Did Vikings Mysteriously Leave Greenland? We May Finally Know The Reason

The westernmost edge of Viking occupation was defined by the southern coast of Greenland.

In the late 10th century waves of Nordic migrants set sail in hopes of a better life abroad. The colony had a large population spread out across three settlements.

And then it ended. There was no word of hardship. There is no record of struggle. By the middle of the 15th century, the Norse experiment was over.

The focus of the collapse may have been shifted from extreme cold to extreme dry weather, according to new research.

Historians believe that the collapse of the colony could have been caused by a variety of factors, including sudden violence at the hands of an invading culture, a gradual decline in birth rates, and hardship brought on by a changing climate.

There is little doubt that a variety of factors were at work, but the consensus is that an enduring drop in temperatures referred to as the Little Ice Age is critical.

A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts and University at Buffalo in the US found wanting in evidence of the idea.

The team suggests that it was a decline in summer rains that made living in Greenland unviable.

The founder of the island's Viking colonies designed the name of the island to be a ruse to get people to come.

Those who came quickly grew accustomed to the long icy winters and extreme remoteness and were able to trade with those back home for dried fruits and timber.

Survival depended on the knowledge of raising meager crops and livestock under extreme conditions and the ability to get food from the ocean.

The population prospered and expanded over the course of several generations before disappearing from historical records in the 1400s.

The period of settlement is a time in history that spans the start of a cooling in the North Atlantic, leading some historians to believe that the colony was only possible because of the relative warmth before this cooling period set in.

There is good reason to think that life was around the time of the Vikings, based on ice core data from elevated sites more than 1,000 kilometers away from the nearest Viking colony.

Before this study, there was no data on the actual site of the settlements. Raymond Bradley says that is a problem.

Bradley's team went to the site of one of the largest farms in the colony's Eastern Settlement and dug up samples of material from a nearby lakebed.

The muck sandwich told a 2,000-year-long story of stable temperatures and decreasing precipitation.

Boyang Zhao is a lead author of the study and he is now at Brown University.

Every year of dry weather is another nail in the coffin.

Potential breakdowns in social ties, a tendency to have smaller families, and a drop in the value of walrus tusks with growing trade for elephant ivory from elsewhere may have made it harder to endure a long dry spell. Social collapse is a complicated business.

Even the hardiest Vikings would find it hard to survive in a land that isn't as green as promised.

Science Advances published this research.