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Mean summer temperatures today at the settlements are around 42 degrees Fahrenheit (5-6 degrees Celsius) on the outer coast, 50° F (10°C) in the interiors of the fjords. While that doesn’t sound so cold, remember that that’s only for the warmest months of the year. In addition, strong dry winds frequently blow down from Greenland’s ice cap, bringing drift ice from the north, blocking the fjords with icebergs even during the summer, and causing dense fogs. I was told that the large short-term climate fluctuations that I encountered during my summer visit to Greenland, including heavy rain, strong winds, and fog, were common and often made it impossible to travel by boat. But boats are the main means of transport in Greenland, because the coast is so deeply indented with branching fjords. (Even today, there are no roads connecting Greenland’s main population centers, and the sole communities joined by road are either located on the same side of the same fjord or else on adjacent different fjords separated by just a low spine of hills.) Such a storm aborted my first attempt to reach Hvalsey Church: I arrived by boat at Qaqortoq in nice weather on July 25, to find ship traffic out of Qaqortoq on July 26 immobilized by wind, rain, fog, and icebergs. On July 27 the weather turned mild again and we reached Hvalsey, and on the following day we steamed back out of Qaqortoq Fjord to Brattahlid under blue skies.

I experienced Greenland weather at its best, at the site of the southernmost Norse settlement in peak summer. As a Southern Californian accustomed to warm sunny days, I would describe the temperatures that I encountered then as “variably cool to cold.” I always needed to wear a wind-breaker over my T-shirt, long-sleeved shirt, and sweatshirt, and often added as well the thick down parka that I had acquired on my first trip to the Arctic. The temperature seemed to change quickly and in wide swings, repeatedly within each hour. It sometimes felt as if my main occupation while out walking in Greenland consisted of taking my parka on and off to adjust to those frequent changes in temperature.

Complicating this picture I have just drawn of modern Greenland’s average climate, the weather can change over short distances and from year to year. The changes over short distances partly account for Christian Keller’s comment to me about the importance of finding the good patches of resources in Greenland. The changes from year to year affect each year’s growth of pasture hay on which the Norse economy depended, and also affect the quantities of sea ice that in turn affect seal hunting plus the possibility of ship travel for trade, both of which were important to the Vikings. Both the weather changes over short distances and from year to year were critical, as Greenland was at best marginally suitable for Norse hay production, so being at a slightly worse site or in a slightly colder-than-usual year could translate into not having enough hay to feed one’s livestock through the winter.

As for the changes with location, an important difference is that one of the two Viking settlements lay 300 miles north of the other, but they were confusingly called Western and Eastern Settlement instead of Northern and Southern Settlement. (Those names had unfortunate consequences centuries later, when the name “Eastern Settlement” misled Europeans looking for the long-lost Greenland Norse to hunt for them in the wrong place, on Greenland’s east coast, instead of on the west coast where the Norse had actually lived.) Summer temperatures are as warm at the more northerly Western Settlement as at the Eastern Settlement. However, the summer growing season is shorter at Western Settlement (just five months with average temperatures above freezing, instead of seven months as at Eastern Settlement), because there are fewer summer days of sunlight and warm temperatures as one gets farther north. Another change in weather with location is that it is colder, wetter, and foggier on the seacoast at the mouths of fjords,