Paleogeographic Reconstruction Of The Little Ice Age - Catastrophic Cosmic Ray Consequences

solarshutdown (62)in #geology • 7 years ago

Little Ice Age (LIA), climate interval that occurred from the early 14th century through the mid-19th century, when mountain glaciers expanded at several locations, including the European Alps, New Zealand, Alaska, and the southern Andes, and mean annual temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere declined by 0.6 °C (1.1 °F) relative to the average temperature between 1000 and 2000 ce. The term Little Ice Age was introduced to the scientific literature by Dutch-born American geologist F.E. Matthes in 1939. Originally the phrase was used to refer to Earth’s most recent 4,000-year period of mountain-glacier expansion and retreat. Today some scientists use it to distinguish only the period 1500–1850, when mountain glaciers expanded to their greatest extent, but the phrase is more commonly applied to the broader period 1300–1850. The Little Ice Age followed the Medieval Warming Period (roughly 900–1300 ce) and preceded the present period of warming that began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Geographic Extent

Information obtained from “proxy records” (indirect records of ancient climatic conditions, such as ice cores, cores of lake sediment and coral, and annual growth rings in trees) as well as historical documents dating to the Little Ice Age period indicate that cooler conditions appeared in some regions, but, at the same time, warmer or stable conditions occurred in others. For instance, proxy records collected from western Greenland, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and western North America point to several cool episodes, lasting several decades each, when temperatures dropped 1 to 2 °C (1.8 to 3.6 °F) below the thousand-year averages for those areas. However, these regional temperature declines rarely occurred at the same time. Cooler episodes also materialized in the Southern Hemisphere, initiating the advance of glaciers in Patagonia and New Zealand, but these episodes did not coincide with those occurring in the Northern Hemisphere. Meanwhile, temperatures of other regions of the world, such as eastern China and the Andes, remained relatively stable during the Little Ice Age.
Still other regions experienced extended periods of drought, increased precipitation, or extreme swings in moisture. Many areas of northern Europe, for instance, were subjected to several years of long winters and short, wet summers, whereas parts of southern Europe endured droughts and season-long periods of heavy rainfall. Evidence also exists of multiyear droughts in equatorial Africa and Central and South Asia during the Little Ice Age.

For these reasons the Little Ice Age, though synonymous with cold temperatures, can also be characterized broadly as a period when there was an increase in temperature and precipitation variability across many parts of the globe.
https://www.britannica.com/science/Little-Ice-Age#toc299977

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

http://www.history.com/news/little-ice-age-big-consequences

http://www.meteo.psu.edu/holocene/public_html/shared/articles/littleiceage.pdf

https://www.eh-resources.org/little-ice-age/