Researchers claim this week in an article in Nature that they have pinpointed the date of Norse/Viking occupation of L’Anse aux Meadows to the year 1021 C.E. (exactly 1,000 years ago), which represents the farthest-known reach of European exploration/settlement in the New World prior to the voyages of Columbus a half-millennium later. According to the new study, up to 100 Norse settlers lived in that coastal village on the northern tip of Newfoundland for a few years before returning to Greenland.
How does the climate of L’Anse aux Meadows compare to the sites of the Viking’s Western and Eastern settlements on Greenland today?
I may be misreading the OP, but I’m not 100% sure if you’re asking how does the climate at L’Anse aux Meadows compare to the Southwestern coast of Greenland today, or how it would have compared 1000 years ago.
At least in present time, the climate where the Norse settlements were in Greenland, and in Newfoundland Island where L’Anse aux Meadows is, are relatively similar. They both have similar surrounding water temperature, and very similar mean annual temperature. The Norse settlements would have gotten a good bit less daylight due to being around 1000mi further north latitude wise. Around the northern part of Newfoundland island where the Meadows are it rains quite a bit more than it does on the southern Greenland coast, and the Koppen climate classification for Newfoundland is “subartic” in the region where L’Anse aux Meadows is, and is “tundra” where the Norse settlements were.
I am not familiar (and I did look) for detailed climate data projections for Newfoundland 1000 years ago, however much study has been done of Greenland in that time because it’s always been of interest to researchers how the Norse settlements interplayed with the Medieval Warm Period. When paleoclimatologists first discovered records suggesting the Medieval Warm Period it got processed in as an explanation for the Norse settlement, and abandonment, of Greenland–namely that it was warmer there 1000 years ago so more amenable to human habitation, and was abandoned when the warm period ended.
It’s murky now as to whether that is true or not. While I’d say “more studies than not” do report that Greenland was warmer 1000 years ago than now, there’s actually been several studies that have glacier derived data suggesting this isn’t true. It’s a little hard to tell where the consensus lies (even the parameters of the Medieval Warm Period remain in dispute.) Additionally, some Danish research have found evidence that suggests whatever the warm/coldness, the Norse settlements persisted for 200 years after Greenland likely got colder, suggesting that IF Greenland indeed was much warmer in the year 1000, its cooling off doesn’t directly explain the abandoned settlements. Their hypothesis is declining economic demand for the items produced in the settlements, combined with the general harshness of living there caused the population of people willing to try and make it there to progressively decline until the settlements were abandoned or died off (there is some evidence they may have died off about 100 years after contact was lost with Scandinavia, but it’s not certain, they may have simply been abandoned deliberately.)
Jared Diamond, in Collapse spends some time discussing the disappearance of Greenland’s Norse settlements. He mentions sea ice getting thicker, resulting in eventually no vessels trying to travel to Greenland. Evidence shows decline in farming and gradual failures of the harvest and of sufficient cattle fodder. Diamond suggests their main ailing was not adapting to the new situation - they failed to learn coping technology from the local Inuit.
Of course, a major problem too was complete lack of lumber, meaning they were dependent on any driftwood and also reliant on outside vessels for travel.
I recall articles recently suggesting global warming has brought Greenland to the same climate as in the peak settlement times of 1000AD plus.
Probably warmer today in most locations; certainly the Arctic has been warming with extraordinary rapidity compared to the relatively localized regional warming of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Parts of the Arctic, including coastal Greenland, is experiencing permafrost melt and exposing biomass that’s been frozen for over 45,000 years, and Greenland is losing more than 240 billion tons of ice every year.
Regarding the OP’s specific question, I don’t know if a definitive answer is known. The US National Academy of Sciences published a report in 2019 about some work done at L’Anse aux Meadows the previous year that was to have included a paleoenvironmental assessment that might have yielded some interesting paleoclimate data from the period. But the work was being done by a bunch of archeologists, not climatologists, and they apparently got distracted by cultural artifacts they were discovering.
But what can be pretty definitively stated is that even if some of these places might have been warmer than today at that time, which was right in the middle of the MWP, one can’t draw any significant conclusions from that detail about global climate.
The fact is that, although some of the details remain controversial, it’s pretty broadly accepted that the global average temperature during the MWP was not as high as today, and moreover, the MWP was not global in extent but mostly confined to parts of Europe and Greenland, and most notably largely absent in the southern hemisphere. Then, as now, regional climate trends could differ substantially from overall global ones, so the fact that a particular location may have been warmer than today a thousand years ago is just a relatively minor microclimate data point.
I thought this was a point worth making since the MWP comes up so often in climate discussions.
Sorry–I misspoke, I meant to say sunshine not daylight–(sunshine hours being hours during day that are not overcast–these are not uniform globally) Greenland around where the Norse settlements were located gets less than 1400 sunshine hours per year, some of the lowest of any location on Earth (Newfoundland is around 1600)–Phoenix averages over 4000 hours of sunshine per year.
While it is not universal across the whole globe, in the regions near the arctic circle in the North Atlantic the further north you go the less sunshine hours you have on average per year–and that is the case in comparing Newfoundland to southern Greenland. I don’t actually really know the reason for this, my understanding is it was related to climate issues relating to the Atlantic Ocean and other things that are outside my knowledge base.
You’ll note that Newfoundland and London, UK are relatively close to the same latitude and both get around 1600 hours of sunshine per year. Going further North, Southwestern Greenland and Reykjavik are at a similar latitude and both are under 1400 hours of sunshine per year.
Not important when comparing places around the same latitude, but anytime else it’s important to remember that same number of hours of daylight doesn’t mean seem amount of solar energy per area. Higher latitudes receive less energy per area because of the angle of the sunlight.
The number of hours of sunlight matters, but the angle of the rays matters more. The tropics are essentially defined by there being one or two days a year that the sun is directly overhead and the energy density is as large as possible.