Little Ice Ages: Ancient and Modern (2-Volume Set)

Since the first edition was published in 1988, interest in and research into climatic history has blossomed and a vast amount of new data has come from such sources as ice cores, speleotherms and tree rings. Our picture of past climates and glacier oscillations has extended further into past and become more detailed. These developments are reflected in the new edition.

The evidence for the Little Ice Age, the most important fluctuation in global climate in historical times, is most dramatically represented by the advance of mountain glaciers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and their retreat since about 1850. The effects on the landscape and the daily life of people have been particularly apparent in Norway and the Alps. This major book places an extensive body of material relating to Europe, in the form of documentary evidence of the history of the glaciers, their portrayal in paintings and maps, and measurements made by scientists and others, within a global perspective.

It shows that the glacial history of mountain regions all over the world displays a similar pattern of climatic events. Furthermore, fluctuations on a comparable scale have occurred at intervals of a millennium or two throughout the last ten thousand years since the ice caps of North America and northwest Europe melted away. This is the first scholarly work devoted to the Little Ice Age, by an author whose research experience of the subject has been extensive. The Little Ice Age: Ancient and Modern includes large numbers of maps, diagrams and photographs, many not published elsewhere, and very full bibliographies. It is a definitive work on the subject, and an excellent focus for the work of economic and social historians as well as glaciologists, climatologists, geographers, and specialists in mountain environment.

List of plates
List of figures
List of tables
Preface
Glossary and Abbreviations
Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

Part I - The Little Ice Age of the Second Millennium
2. Icelandic Glaciers and Sea Ice
3. Scandinavia
4. The Mont Blanc Massif
5. Otztal in the Austrian Alps
6. Glacier fluctuations and Little Ice Age weather in Switzerland
7. Glaciers in the Pyrenees, Maritime Alps and Apennines
8. Asia
9. North America
10. The Arctic Islands
11. Glaciers in low latitudes
12. Southern Andes and New Zealand
13. Antarctica and the Sub Antarctic Islands
14. Climate in the Little Ice Age

Part II - The Holocene
15. Glacial History of the Holocene

Part III - Context, Causes and Consequences
16. The Little Ice Age in its longer term context: the Younger Dryas and evidence from ice cores and deep sea cores
17. The causes of the Little Ice Age and similar fluctuations
18. The consequences of the Little Ice Age
19. A summing up Bibliography

Geographical index
Source index
Subject index