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The Little Ice Age, by the anthropologist Brian Fagan of the University of California at Santa Barbara, describes the plight of European peasants from 1300 to 1850: famines, hypothermia, bread riots and the rise of despotic leaders brutalizing an increasingly dispirited
This vegetation map showing the eastern USA during the period 28,000-25,000 14C y.a. has been compiled by Paul & Hazel Delcourt. An ice sheet already covered most of Canada and extended south of the Great Lakes.
The Little Ice Age was a period of wide-spread cooling that lasted from the end of the Medieval Warm Period early in the 14th century, until the present-day warming trend that started in the middle to late 19th century (graph below).
Little Ice Age (LIA), climate interval that occurred from the early 14th century through the mid-19th century, when mountain glaciers expanded at several locations, including the European Alps, New Zealand, Alaska, and the southern Andes, and mean annual temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere.
A map of vegetation patterns during the last glacial maximum. The average global temperature about 21,000 years ago was about 6 °C (11 °F) colder than today. [12][13][14] According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), permanent summer ice covered about 8% of Earth's surface and 25% of the land area during the last glacial maximum. [15] .
When most people think of ice ages, or “glacial ages,” they often envision cavemen, woolly mammoths, and vast plains of ice—such as those that occurred during the Pleistocene (about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) or the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods (about 300 million years ago).
The term Little Ice Age was originally coined by F Matthes in 1939 to describe the most recent 4000 year climatic interval (the Late Holocene) associated with a particularly dramatic series of mountain glacier advances and retreats, analogous to, though considerably more moderate than, the Pleistocene glacial fluctuations.
