Historical Climatology
Research projects, field reports, data rescue, and interdisciplinary climate scholarship.
When Gilbert Walker codified the Southern Oscillation in the 1920s, he did not define a causal mechanism that could explain weather variability in other parts of the world. Rather, Walker’s Southern Oscillation was the application of a branch of statistics…
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As readers of HistoricalClimatology.com know, there’s nothing new about observing the weather and worrying about climate change. We are fortunate to have a legacy of hundreds of years of observations bequeathed to us by our scientific forebears. But it is a…
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A river is not simply a tidy channel of water traversing dry land. It is a complex system that carries organic and mineral material out of higher altitude locations and deposits them on a floodplain or estuary.[1] The Yellow River, situated near the northern…
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Martin Bauch, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), LeipzigThomas Labbé, Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig, Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Dijon, DijonAnnabell Engel, Leibniz…
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Zak Baillie, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National UniversityDr Joëlle Gergis, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University
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Times of hunger and starvation were part of life for northern Indigenous peoples. Dene, Inuvialuit, and Gwich’in shared lessons about planning to avoid starvation, the need to show proper respect and gratitude for good hunts and successful fishing, and how…
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Heat is a ubiquitous part of tropical living. During the nineteenth century consumers and writers of travel literature, explorers and colonists became increasingly familiar with the endless, languid summers of tropical climates where continued, unrelenting…
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Figure 1. Fort of Sofala (Mozambique) from Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg's atlas Civitates orbis terrarum, vol. I, 1572.
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Eva Jobbová, Arlene Crampsie, Conor Murphy, Francis Ludlow, Robert McLeman, Csaba Horvath
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This past winter I was fortunate to join the Arctia Otso icebreaker in the Gulf of Bothnia, Finland, from March 2 to March 24, 2017. I had sailed the Northwest Passage aboard the Canadian Coast Guard ships Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Louis S. St-Laurent in 2015.…
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I am in the third circle, filled with cold,unending, heavy, and accursed rain; its measure and its kind are never changed.Gross hailstones, water gray with filth, and snow come streaking down across the shadowed air;the earth, as it receives that shower,…
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