Little Ice Age
proper noun
- period of cooling that occurred after the Medieval Warm Period, usually defined as between the 16th to the 19th centuries
Wiktionary
name
Etymology: From little + ice age, coined by Dutch-American topographer and geologist François E. Matthes in 1939.
- A period of cooling (not a true ice age) that followed the Medieval Warm Period and continued from about 1300 to about 1850.
“The Little Ice Age that chilled Europe–variously dated from 1250 to 1900 or 1550 to 1850–should, according to past precedents, have snowballed into a full-blown ice age.”
“They knew that the so-called “little ice age”, a series of cold snaps between, roughly, 1350 and 1850, had brought not only drought and famine, but also war – and so could these new climatic changes.”