How the Vikings became the world’s first climate change profiteers

[Viggen]

Historians have long puzzled over the explosive growth of the Vikings. Now a new theory is gaining steam. The great achievements of the Viking Age were almost entirely enabled by the impersonal workings of climate. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. All human civilizations are hostage to weather, but none more so than sailors, who must confront both the violent nature of the ocean’s surface and the capricious atmosphere that imparts motion to their wind-powered vessels. When those mariners are surrounded by seas that produce icebergs and pack ice for up to six months of the year, even a few more weeks of warmer weather a year were literally life-changing.

 

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