La Nina Events Triggered European Famines

For many years, scientists have known that correlations existed between the weather patterns governing the Pacific Ocean and the climate of both North America and Europe. In a recent investigation, however, it was demonstrated for the first time that the two seemingly-unrelated phenomena are indeed linked. The study shows that La Nina events, which typically occur once three to five years and promote a cooling of Pacific equatorial waters, influenced drought patterns in Europe, causing widespread famine. In what is now the United States, the events led to the disappearance of cave dwelling people, OurAmazingPlanet reports.

“We've known for some time the connection between El Nino and La Nina and the weather conditions in North America and Europe. La Nina-like conditions, such as those we found, can cause persistent drought, and as we know warm conditions cause increased precipitation,” explains University of Miami climate scientist Robert Burgman. He was also a coauthor of a new investigation detailing the findings, which appears in the latest issue of the esteemed scientific publication Geophysical Research Letters.

The experts behind the new work aren't exactly sure if the weather patterns in question were indeed La Nina, but argue that the low temperatures recorded in the waters of the Pacific Ocean during medieval times were fairly consistent with this atmospheric phenomenon. It is known that La Nina can cause massive droughts, but it can also trigger the formation of impressive hurricanes. Conversely, the El Nino event stops the development of such tropical storms, but looping their upper sides, and preventing them from growing to impressive sizes.

“The marriage of complex climate models with paleo-records of sea surface temperature and other climate variables provide valuable insight to climate scientists who wish to understand climate variability and change before the instrumental record,” the expert adds. “If we can fill in the gaps with data from corals and other records from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans, we'll have a better idea of what has happened to the global climate over time,” he says. The researchers focused their attention on the Great Famine, an event that affected the whole of Europe, and which took place from 1315 to 1320.