A picture from February 2012. The Oude Waal, under the smoke of Nijmegen in the Ooijpolder. The sun is shining, it is freezing hard and the frost-covered trees by the water contrast sharply with the bright blue sky above. In the distance the white plume of smoke from the Power Plant is visible. Hundreds of people skate on the thick ice. From the dike it looks like a teeming anthill. The enthusiastic screams of children are not in the air. You can buy biscuits and sweets at two different tents.
It looks like a painting by a Dutch master, I hear someone say. And then he is talking about Hendrick Avercamp, the most famous of the painters of typical Dutch winter landscapes. Avercamp lived in the midst of what we now call the Little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age ran from roughly 1550 to about 1850, but the cooling to it had started earlier, some say as early as the 14th century. During the Little Ice Age, the average temperatures in our area were about 1 to 2 degrees lower than today. There were far more cold winters than now, often starting in November and sometimes ending only in April.
Beautiful body of work
Avercamp was born in Amsterdam in the winter of 1585, but soon moved to Kampen. He was deaf and dumb and specialized in drawing at a young age. As a lover of painting winter scenes, he was more than happy to have fun during the Little Ice Age. It was hit almost every year and with the help of the sketches he made during the winters, he was able to continue working on his winter landscapes during the summers. A beautiful oeuvre was created, which for winter lovers - especially now that winters usually skip in our time - is more than worth a look.
The background to the Little Ice Age is still being discussed. The cooling came after the medieval climate optimum, in which temperatures were comparable to even slightly higher than now. It was the time when the south of Greenland was colonized by the Vikings, where wine could be grown as far as the British Isles and when even peaches grew in Flanders.
What made the climate suddenly change?
From the 16th century, all of this was suddenly no longer possible. The exact causes of the cooling at that time are still a bit of a guess. According to one scientist, some explosive volcanic eruptions were behind the sudden changes in our climate, others are intrigued by the changes on the surface of the sun that were taking place at the time. For example, the low point of the Little Ice Age seemed to coincide with the period known today as the Maunder Minimum, when there were hardly any sunspots on the surface of the sun. The Maunderminimum started in 1645 and lasted until 1715.
A new study, conducted by scientists from Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the United States, adds a new one to the possible list of causes. From research in the vicinity of Iceland and Greenland, they have been able to reconstruct how the amount of sea ice, which was driven south from the Arctic Ocean through Fram Street on the east side of Greenland and ended up in the Northern Ocean, suddenly became very strong from roughly 1300. increased.
This made the seawater of the North Atlantic Ocean colder and sweeter. And it should have been this development that helped trigger the Little Ice Age, the researchers think. The period in which much more sea ice penetrated the North Atlantic Ocean than usual lasted until the end of the 14th century and then ended as abruptly as it had started. The climate change, which was (partly) the result, lasted longer and lasted until the middle of the 19th century.
External float not always necessary
According to the study authors, these events show that the climate doesn't always need an external driver to change suddenly. This is in line with research by the KNMI, among others, which shows that even in times of a warming climate, such as now, it can still be considerably colder for several decades. Various model simulations have already come up with such, reasonably inexplicable extremes.
However, the research now published also leaves many questions open. One of those questions is what exactly was the cause of that suddenly larger ice transport from the Arctic to the North Atlantic? Was that a change in the Arctic wind regime that pushed the sea ice south? Or was it simply that more ice was formed as temperatures dropped, which made it easier to escape? If the latter is true, it could again be a bit of a "Chicken and the Egg" story.
Chances of recurrence now very small