The dust jacket of Jean Grove's book The Little Ice Age features a striking 1899 photograph of Mary Vaux, ice axe in hand, at the crevassed front of the Illecillewaet Glacier. Mary looks delicate and fragile; the glacier juts toward her like the paw of a lion. The picture is a photographic metaphor for the Little Ice Age, a time when farmsteads were overrun by ice and swept by flood, priests exorcised advancing ice demons, and catastrophic crop failures affected regions far beyond the glacier margins. Contemporary accounts refer to the glaciers of the day as "terrible," "horrible," "horrid." During the Little Ice Age the glacier-front environment was neither a safe nor a pleasant place for human habitation.
The book's twelve chapters fall into six natural groups. We learn in an introductory chapter that the Little Ice Age began in the 13th and 14th centuries, ameliorated somewhat during the 15th century, and culminated between the mid-16th and mid-19th centuries. It was a global phenomenon, the most recent in a series of similar events during the Holocene. Mountain glaciers responded sensitively to long-term temperature fluctuations no greater than about 2ยฐC. Grove reviews methods for dating the glacial record, and concludes that there are practical, as well as academic, reasons for studying the Little Ice Age and its predecessors.
Chapters 2-6, accounting for almost half of the text, deal with the Little Ice Age in Iceland, Scandinavia, the Mont Blanc massif, Otztal (eastern Alps), and Switzerland. North Americans will find these chapters humbling. The European record is so long, so detailed, and derived from so many independent sources. There are sea-ice and glacier observations from the settlement period in Iceland (9th century) to the present. There are documents detailing damage to farms by glaciers, floods, and other climate-related calamities. There are phenological records (grape-harvest dates, for example) and temperature-sensitive fisheries records. There are weather diaries such as those of Rudolph Reiter, the Swiss baker who from 1721 to 1738 "noted the weather hour by hour not only through the day but also through much of the night." There are maps, sketches, lithographs, paintings, and photographs of glaciers. There is the accumulated bounty of a long European tradition of recording the positions of glacier fronts, and of systematic mass-balance studies that began in the latter part of the 19th century. The author sees "striking consistency" in the timing of major glacier fluctuations throughout Europe. Advances are dated to around A.D. 1600-1610, 1690-1700, the 1770s, 1820, and 1850. The 1850 advance was followed by a period of general recession, with brief stillstands and minor readvances in the 1880s, 1920s and 1960s-1970s. Chapters 7-9 discuss the Little Ice Age in mountainous regions outside Europe. Historical data are less plentiful in these regions, or have not yet been fully efploited.