Do you really need a study for that? Honestly. Where do you think the name Greenland came from? Do people imagine that the early Vikings—who were many things but not terminally stupid—looked at a frozen wasteland of ice and snow and thought, “Yes, this will be a fine branding exercise”?
We know perfectly well today that the world was meaningfully warmer during the Medieval Warm Period. Not a rounding error. Not a footnote. A real, lived climatic phase. Scandinavian mountain passes were usable that had been buried under ice until they were rediscovered only recently. Greenland was settled. Not probed. Not visited. Settled. And yes, those same Vikings pushed farther west and eventually reached North America. Weather permitted it. Geography allowed it. Reality complied.
Would they have established real settlements in Greenland if all they had found was ice, snow, and despair? Highly unlikely. Perhaps a temporary whaling outpost or two, the sort of grim, male-only enterprise history is full of. But that’s not what the archaeological record shows. What we actually find are family settlements. Children’s toys. Domestic artifacts. The kind of things people bring when they expect to live, not merely endure.
And then there’s the inconvenient detail no one likes to talk about: the rootstocks of entire birch forests. Forests. Birch trees do not grow in Greenland today. They did then. Trees are annoyingly honest witnesses. They don’t care about narratives, funding cycles, or political fashion. They either grow or they don’t.
Eight hundred years ago, Greenland was warmer than it is now. Not hypothetically. Not metaphorically. Measurably. And yes, that fact is deeply inconvenient for anyone whose worldview depends on the idea that our current climate is some kind of unprecedented, end-of-days anomaly.
Reality has always been like this. It refuses to cooperate. It sits there, unimpressed, waiting for us to catch up.
