4 stories from this place.
The Spörer Minimum was a period of unusually low solar activity that ran from approximately 1450 to 1540. It overlapped with the catastrophic late-medieval collapse of Norse Greenland, the worst phase of the Little Ice Age in central Europe, and the agricultural crisis that preceded the religious upheavals of the Reformation.
Read the story →Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland in 982 for killing two men. He spent three years exploring the next island to the west. He returned, organised a settler expedition of 25 ships, and gave the new territory the most successful real-estate name in medieval European history.
Read the story →In June 1783 a 27-kilometre fissure opened in southern Iceland and erupted for eight months. It killed about a fifth of Iceland's population. The sulphur cloud killed an estimated 23,000 in England. The crop failures it caused across Europe fed directly into the French Revolution of 1789.
Read the story →From around 1300 to 1850 the northern hemisphere ran a few degrees colder. Glaciers advanced, harvests failed, Norse Greenland died, and the Thames repeatedly froze.
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