Orkney: Fourth St. Magnus Conference: Alternative Fact and Actual Fiction

Dr. King used Research and Professional Development to present, at conference, a research project that uses historical and literary evidence to reconstruct the past climates of northern locations.

This presentation highlights transdisciplinary research using historical and literary evidence for the reconstruction of past climates. Emphasis is on three separate but interlinked projects for three different northern locations. For Norway, farm diaries describing lake-ice formation and break-up has led to the construction of a temperature record covering the years 1700 to 2006. For Labrador, descriptions of weather and climate by Moravian missionaries have similarly led to climate reconstructions. A new project focusing on literary and historical records from Iceland will lead to insights regarding past climate variations as well as illuminating human environmental perceptions through poetry and folktales.