Item — HN Reader

Indeed the little ice age of the middle ages is what made Greenland uninhabitable.

Birch is a pioneer species, they produce millions of seeds a year, they chased the retreating ice cap as melted northwards in Europe.

It would appear they need to be planted out, perhaps they need soil to take. Otherwhise it should be a fairly simple case of just broadcasting billions of birch seeds over Iceland.

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Greenland didn't become uninhabitable during the little ice age, there's people living now in Greenland descended from people who survived that supposedly uninhabitable country.

The Norse colony got wiped out, but it's unknown whether that was because of war, famine or some other reason. We just know life would have been hardier in those years.

What little we do know suggests that they were unwilling to learn the traditional lifestyle from the natives, and the country became uninhabitable for anyone insisting on only using Norse farming methods.

There was an article in Scientific America:

Summary :

After prospering for hundreds of years, the Viking colonies in Greenland were mysteriously abandoned.

Scholars have long viewed their decline as the result of a stubborn refusal to adapt their European customs to the conditions of this Arctic land.

Yet recent findings show that the Greenland Vikings did change their ways. The latest evidence suggests that a complex interplay of cultural and political forces abroad brought about their demise.

Full article (requires subscription)

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whatever-happened...

Perhaps worth noting that the natives got wiped out too. Modern Greenlanders are descended from people arriving on the scene well after the Scandinavians did.

What I meant was that at the time the Norse disappeared there were other people in Greenland living in far harsher conditions, as the map accompanying this article shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture#Historical_and_...

I think you're thinking about Dorset culture which arrived in the south of Greenland after the Norse disappeared, but as the map shows when the Norse disappeared the Thule culture coexisted with them in Greenland far in the north where conditions were worse.

Which shows you that the problem was not that the area was uninhabitable, but that the Norse didn't have the knowledge or desire to survive there.

Hanging on for 400 years hardly constitutes not having knowledge or desire how to survive there.

They arrived in a period where the weather was particularly good, and proceeded to just practice the same sort of farming that they were used to in Scandinavia and Iceland.

But there's no indication that they were actively contacting the native population to learn their hunting techniques, such as how to build kayaks and hunt marine mammals, or venture under the ice to gather mussels[1] etc.

Which, to bring this thread around to the original point being made, doesn't suggest that "Greenland [was] uninhabitable", just that a population of people had arrived that didn't know how to make use of it.

You might be able to transport a tribe from the middle of the Amazon to northern Greenland today and them not being able to survive, or the other way around. That doesn't mean that either place is uninhabitable.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0qGvC3vqaA

This is a little outdated.

The more modern theory is that walrus tusk (which was extremely valuable until elephant ivory became available) prices crashed meaning the ships had little reason to travel to Greenland for trade.

I think that this coincided with the Black death which truly devastated the Norwegian population.

I know. I live among birches in soutern Scandinavia. One thing they need, though: Water, and plenty of it. I'm not really sure the Icelandic ground delivers.