The Little Ice Age : re-evaluation of an evolving concept
Climate ; Climatic variation ; Concept ; Glacier ; Land atmosphere interaction ; Little ice age ; Model ; Ocean atmosphere interaction ; Palaeoclimatology
This review focuses on the development of the Little Ice Age as a glaciological and climatic concept, and evaluates its current usefulness in the light of new data on the glacier and climatic variations of the last millennium and of the Holocene
. It is concluded that the concept of a Little Ice Age will remain useful only by : continuing to incorporate the temporal and spatial complexities of glacier and climatic variations as they become better known; reflecting improved understanding of the Earth
. This reconstruction is also compared with two multi-millennial temperature proxy records from northern Fennoscandia as well as a Northern Hemisphere composite tree-ring chronology regarding the postulated periods such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.
Norway and New Zealand both experienced recent glacial advances, commencing in the early 1980s and ceasing around 2000, which were more exensive than any other since the end of the Little Ice Age. Common to both countries, the positive glacier