The Spörer Minimum was a 90-year period of unusually low solar activity that coincided with which catastrophic medieval collapse?
The Spörer Minimum ran approximately 1450–1540 — the deepest phase of the Little Ice Age in northern Europe. Norse Greenland's Eastern Settlement had been continuous since Erik the Red founded it in 985 AD; the last documented event is a 1408 wedding at Hvalsey Church, and the settlement appears to have died out around the 1450s. The cause is contested (climate plus Inuit expansion plus collapse of trans-Atlantic shipping), but the Spörer Minimum timing fits. Hans Egede sailed to Greenland in 1721 looking for the lost community and found only Inuit.
Read the full story →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.
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