Taxonomy term

Today, Finland’s Northern Ostrobothnia region is one of the northernmost places in Europe that can support agriculture. But how this region fared during the Little Ice Age — a period of globally cooler temperatures that lasted roughly from A.D. 1300 to 1850 — is unknown. Scientists assume the climatic cooling would have adversely affected food supplies. Now, however, the discovery of a mysterious medieval cemetery in northern Finland dating to the middle of the Little Ice Age is offering clues that the inhabitants were well fed and well suited to the northern clime.

The 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens was a pivotal event in the geologic careers of many volcanologists. Maybe it drove them to the geosciences, maybe it opened a door for more monitoring and research jobs in the United States, or maybe it was just an excellent example that the lower 48 states are volcanically active. However, as seminal as the 1980 eruption was, it happened almost 20 years before most of today’s college students were even born. To them, the eruption is another example from history, like Pelée or Vesuvius. They likely don’t have the same visceral reaction to it as those who remember it (even if, like me, you were still in preschool when the eruption occurred.)

Mangrove trees, which today thrive in tropical and subtropical climates in the low and midlatitudes, grew in the high Russian Arctic about 56 million years ago, scientists reported in Geology. It’s the northernmost occurrence of mangrove trees ever documented.