I feel so privileged to be able to feel home both in Denmark and in Greenland!Greenland is part of the Danish kingdom, so there are many Danes in Greenland, and approximately 16500 Greenlanders living in Denmark. Many, like myself, have families in both countries. Many Greenlanders study in Denmark. Did Elephants doom the Norse in Greenland? A new article is examining the theory that Greenland's medieval Norse settlements were ruined by the collapse of the trade in walrus tusks, after ivory from elephants became more easily accessible for artisans in Europe. During periods of increased supply in response to European demand, the price.
A new article is examining the theory that Greenland's medieval Norse settlements were ruined by the collapse of the trade in walrus tusks, after ivory from elephants became more easily accessible for artisans in Europe.In her article, 'Desirable teeth: the medieval trade in Arctic and African ivory,' Kirsten Seaver criticizes that idea, and puts forward her own theory about why the Norse settlers mysteriously vanished from Greenland sometime during the 15th century.
In 1998, Danish archaeologist Else wrote an article which suggested that in the beginning of the fourteenth century, a surplus of reasonably priced elephant ivory from Africa caused ivory from walrus tusks to lose its market share, which were so catastrophic that it eventually led to the collapse of the entire Norse Greenland colony.
Ivory has been a prized commodity in Europe and Asia since antiquity, with ports along the north African coast controlling much of the trade. When Norse settlers arrived in Greenland during in the 10th century, they soon found that walrus ivory could be a profitable trade.
Roesdahl believes that this trade went through Norway and would have been a cheaper alternative to elephant ivory. Several carved tusks have been found among the treasures of European rulers, particularly Scandinavian kings.
She writes, 'Prior to 1500, it is highly unlikely that there was a drop in the price of elephant ivory capable of displacing walrus tusks in the market, even in periods when more African ivory appears to have been reaching European workshops. It is far more likely that, during periods of increased supply in response to European demand, the price of African ivory would have risen in step with the available quantities, because the transportation costs arising from Africa’s immense distances.'
![Demand Demand](/uploads/1/2/4/8/124804470/286044935.png)
Seaver believes that large numbers of Greenlanders may have even tried to develop settlements in Labrador, with English support, which proved to be disastrous, as the climate in that portion of northern Canada was much more hostile than even in Greenland.
'If the Norse Greenlanders migrated west to a stretch of Labrador chosen by others,' Seaver writes, 'as it appears likely that they did, they may have ended up on the bottom of the Davis Strait before even reaching the other shore, or they may have perished during their first winter in the new land from new diseases, from starvation, or simply from the bitter cold.'
Seaver's article, 'Desirable teeth: the medieval trade in Arctic and African ivory, appears in the Journal of Global History, Volume 4 (2009). See also:
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The first episode of the Netflix documentary series Our Planet features a violin-filled requiem for an iceberg the size of a skyscraper. As it breaks from the Greenland Ice Sheet and drives a colossal tidal wave, narrator David Attenborough explains that glaciers have always released ice into the ocean. What’s different now is that it’s happening more often — and according to a study released Monday in PNAS, it’s occurring at an increasingly rapid rate.
Over that time period, the mass loss increased sixfold.”
Watching a glacier crack with a rumble into the sea is an impressive sight, but to truly understand what’s going on with the Greenland Ice Sheet — a mass of glacial land ice three times the size of Texas — you have to look at its evolution through a historical lens. It’s important, co-author Eric Rignot, Ph.D., a professor at the University of California, Irvine, tells Inverse, to place the recent mass loss into a longer-term context.
Previous research demonstrated that, in 2012, the annual ice loss was already nearly four times the rate it was in 2003. What Rignot and his team found in the new study was alarming: The Greenland Ice Sheet has undergone rapid and irreversible change, and they can pinpoint exactly when the climate of the planet took a terrible turn.
“Going from a 20-year-long record to a 40-year-long record shows us a transition from a climate dominated by natural variability to a climate dominated by climate warming from human emissions of greenhouse gases,” Rignot says. “Over that time period, the mass loss increased sixfold.”
To come to this conclusion, they evaluated 46 years worth of data documenting the ice velocity, thickness, and surface elevation of 260 glacial drainage basins. They plugged this data into advanced atmospheric climate models that allowed them to estimate rates of ice accumulation, sublimation, melting at the glacier surface, and the velocity and thickness of ice discharge into the ocean.
The data show that in the ‘70s, the Greenland Ice Sheet gained an average of 47 gigatonnes of ice per year. But by the 1980s, it was losing an average of 50 gigatonnes of ice annually. Rignot explains that this is the time when “the climate of the planet drifted off its natural variability to become dominated by warming from human activity.”
Losing ice is now the new normal. Since the ‘80s, the rate of ice loss has increased sixfold. From 2010 to 2018, the average loss was 290 gigatonnes of ice per year.
This is a matter to take extremely seriously. If all of the Greenland Ice Sheet melted, the sea level would rise about 20 feet. This study estimates that since 1972, Greenland ice loss has raised the sea level by 13.7 millimeters, and half of that rise has happened just in the last eight years.
In the meantime, we should prepare for what is coming.”
They also predict that the mass changes in the northern part of Greenland will have the greatest influence on sea level rise because of its large reserve of ice above sea level and “the potential for manyfold increase in ice discharge.” Rising sea levels expose coastlines to greater risks of flooding, erosion, and hazard from storms. Higher sea levels are already pushing storm surges farther inland than they once did — an endangerment to human life.
Rignot anticipates that these losses will continue to increase every year and that sea level rise rates will progress faster “until we take major actions to curb our carbon emissions and get this climate under control.” At that point, he says, if we’re to really to stabilize this part of the world, we’ll have to also bring it back to a colder state.
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Abstract:
We reconstruct the mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet using a comprehensive survey of thickness, surface elevation, velocity, and surface mass balance (SMB) of 260 glaciers from 1972 to 2018. We calculate mass discharge, D, into the ocean directly for 107 glaciers (85% of D) and indirectly for 110 glaciers (15%) using velocity-scaled reference fluxes. The decadal mass balance switched from a mass gain of +47 ± 21 Gt/y in 1972–1980 to a loss of 51 ± 17 Gt/y in 1980–1990. The mass loss increased from 41 ± 17 Gt/y in 1990–2000, to 187 ± 17 Gt/y in 2000–2010, to 286 ± 20 Gt/y in 2010–2018, or sixfold since the 1980s, or 80 ± 6 Gt/y per decade, on average. The acceleration in mass loss switched from positive in 2000–2010 to negative in 2010–2018 due to a series of cold summers, which illustrates the difficulty of extrapolating short records into longer-term trends. Cumulated since 1972, the largest contributions to global sea level rise are from northwest (4.4 ± 0.2 mm), southeast (3.0 ± 0.3 mm), and central west (2.0 ± 0.2 mm) Greenland, with a total 13.7 ± 1.1 mm for the ice sheet. The mass loss is controlled at 66 ± 8% by glacier dynamics (9.1 mm) and 34 ± 8% by SMB (4.6 mm). Even in years of high SMB, enhanced glacier discharge has remained sufficiently high above equilibrium to maintain an annual mass loss every year since 1998.