Late Antique Little Ice Age

The term and concept were first coined and described in February 2016, in the Nature Geoscience article titled "Cooling and societal change during the Late Antique Little Ice Age from 536 to around 660 AD" by Ulf Büntgen, et al.[3] The existence of a cooling period was proposed as a theory in 2015, and subsequently confirmed as the period from AD 536 to about 660.

[3] Volcanic eruptions, meteorites striking the Earth's surface, and comet fragments exploding in the upper atmosphere have been proposed for the climatic cooling in 536 and afterwards.

[10] While the volcanic eruptions began the freeze, researchers think that increased ocean ice cover (feedback to the effects of the volcanoes), coupled with an "exceptional" minimum of solar activity in the 600s, reinforced and extended the cooling.

[3] According to research done by Israeli scientists, in 540, the size of the population of the city of Elusa, in the Negev Desert, and the amount of garbage that it generated started to shrink greatly.

The cooling period likely devastated Northern Europe leading to as many as half of the population in for example Scandinavia perishing, and has been credited as being the real precedent to the concept in Norse mythology referred to as Fimbulwinter.

[3] According to 2024 research, major plagues that significantly impacted the remnants of the Roman Empire, during the Late Antique Ice Age, are strongly linked to cooler and drier climate conditions, indicating that colder weather may have contributed to the spread of these diseases during that time.

[16][17] On the other hand, Haggai Olshanetsky and Lev Cosijns argue that the plague and LALIA had a limited impact, as various archaeological evidence indicates there was no demographic or economic decline in the 6th century eastern Mediterranean.