Greenland Farmers

One of my favorite teachers, ever, was my seventh-grade Social Studies teacher, Mrs. Cornett. In our school district, seventh grade meant American History, and Mrs. Cornett not only had an encyclopedic knowledge of her subject (she was the type to spend one summer in Colonial Virginia, the next touring Lexington and Concord and other Massachusetts haunts, the next touring Civil War battlefields), but also had a flair for making Ulysses S. Grant and William Howard Taft sound as if they lived just up to road, in Deer Valley. Much of the second half of the school year was given over to student oral reports; before we went off to the library, she would hand us a mimeographed list of instructions, chief among which was, "Don't bore us with facts, tell us INTERESTING STORIES!" For that was her credo: American history was one fascinating event after another. Chiefly because of her, I very nearly chose history as a major in college (probably as a precursor to law school) before settling on English.

One of her most memorable stories started way before Columbus, the tale of the Vikings' brief exploration of North America, made possible by the emigation of whole tribes from Norway to Iceland to Greenland at around AD 900. Here, we were told, was the great historical tidbit: Leif Ericson, the most famous of the North American explorers, had a father named Eric the Red, who was not only a pillager in his own right, but also one of the first example of an unscrupulous real estate agent. (Think Glengarry Glen Ross meets Thor from The Avengers.) It was Eric, we were told, who named a solid sheet of ice (the biggst island in the world) Greenland, ironically coaxing his fellow Vikings, heretofore living on Iceland (which was, is, mostly green) to purchase a plot of land owned by him. It was only (the tale went) when Eric's dupes reached Greenland that they discovered an ice shelf, and so they pushed south, south to a place we now call America . . .

Well, almost.

As this article makes clearGreenland wasn't always a solid block of ice. In fact, as historical reasearch has demonstrated, a thousand years ago the southern portion of Greenland was quite arable farmland. Seven hundred years ago, during an unseasonably warm period in the earth's history, Greenland's farms did a brisk business, and such was the trading between islands and continent that the wine brewed in England threatened to put French vineyards out of business.

Now? Well, until very recently, Greenland was a sheet of ice. And wine stomped in England's climate was sold in bargain barrels in Picadilly Circus.

And it's warmer now. We can blame human behavior. But before? What caused Greenland to be so warm in 1300? The SUVs?