Abstract
The section presents the combined climate reconstruction of Russian Arctic since 1435 based on historical documents, proxy paleodata and model calculations. This work introduces little known pieces of evidence with various kinds of climatic or natural history information reported by European and Russian seafarers, travelers, and explorers who visited the Barents and Kara sea basins. As the amount and quality of information for individual time intervals are, however, insufficient (particularly for the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries) for correct quantitative temperature reconstruction, in this work the results of the historical–climatological study and the data of the climate simulation in the BKS region are combined to produce such a reconstruction. Results of the study indicates that in passed six centuries large temperature variations comparable with the present warming occurred in Russian Arctic in historic times due to the natural climate factors. This climate pattern had a great influence on the discovery and development of the region.
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Notes
- 1.
Modern observation of glaciers of Novaya Zemlya northern isle (Zeeberg and Forman 2001) show that glaciers which were in the tidal zone were able to retreat with a great speed, exceeding 300 m per year.
- 2.
At present this famous ice wall exists also, but usually it is destroyed in August-September and in the warmest years it doesn’t even exist from April through November.
- 3.
 It’s just known that till the end of this warm period, i.e. until the late 1720s Dutch whalers regularly came to Novaya Zemlya – pits dug by them on the western coast for whales’ fat melting out were encountered till the late 18th century. However in the second quarter of the 18th century when the ice situation aggravated landing to Novaya Zemlya became more dangerous and foreign whalers abandoned the waters of Novaya Zemlya for a very long time – until the middle of the next nineteenth century.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Director of the Seminar for East European History of Rhein University, Bonn, Germany, Professor Dittmar Dahlmann and his staff for their help and hospitality.
I should particularly like to thank Natalia Astrina for her valuable contribution to the project. I would also like to acknowledge support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Gerda Henkel Foundation (Germany).
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Klimenko, V.V. (2010). A Composite Reconstruction of the Russian Arctic Climate Back to A.D. 1435. In: Przybylak, R. (eds) The Polish Climate in the European Context: An Historical Overview. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3167-9_13
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