Little Ice Age
Topic: Climate Change: Causes, Evidence and the Global Response · NCERT: Class 11, Ch 11 "World Climate and Climate Change"
Meaning
The Little Ice Age was a cool period from 1550 to about 1850. Alpine glaciers advanced, winters were harsh, the River Thames in London froze and crops failed. Beyond NCERT, it is linked to the Maunder Minimum (1645–1715), a spell when the Sun had very few sunspots. It is also linked to large volcanic eruptions. It was regional and smaller than today's warming.
Example
The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 put huge amounts of gas and dust into the sky. This caused the "year without a summer" in 1816, with crop failures in Europe and North America.
Don't confuse with
- Pleistocene glacial period: a true ice age, when ice sheets covered large parts of the continents. The Little Ice Age was a much smaller cool spell inside the present warm Holocene.
- Medieval Warm Period: the warm phase before it (about 950–1250), when the Vikings settled Greenland.