The Little Ice Age
The period of regional cooling from roughly 1300 to 1850 — glacial advances, frozen rivers, failed harvests — and what it reveals about climate sensitivity.
The Little Ice Age was a period of generally cooler conditions, roughly 1300 to 1850 CE, when glaciers advanced in Europe, the Alps, Scandinavia, and Iceland, and the North Atlantic cooled measurably. It was not a single deep freeze but a regional, fluctuating cooling of perhaps 0.5–1.0 °C below 20th-century averages, concentrated in the North Atlantic region — a reminder that climate change is rarely globally uniform.
What happened
Three cold pulses stand out. The Spörer and Maunder minima (roughly 1460–1550 and 1645–1715) coincide with reduced solar activity (fewer sunspots) and heightened volcanism; the 1452–53 Kuwae eruption and the 1815 Tambora eruption each cooled the following years sharply — 1816 became "the year without a summer," with snow in June across New England. Norse settlements in Greenland collapsed as sea ice closed shipping routes; Icelandic grain farming ended; Alpine villages were overrun by advancing ice. The Thames Frost Fairs, held on the frozen river from 1607 to 1814, are the popular emblem of the period.
Why it matters beyond history
The Little Ice Age is the closest large-scale natural experiment in forcing global climate downward, and its lessons matter. It shows the sensitivity of agriculture to small temperature shifts — a degree or so rearranged harvests, and famine followed in vulnerable regions. It also demonstrates the role of internal variability (volcanic aerosols, solar minima, ocean circulation shifts) superimposed on longer trends, which informs how scientists separate natural variability from the greenhouse effect signal in the modern record. Related reading: jet stream and water cycle for the mechanisms that distribute the cooling.
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climate famine history little ice age