Eurasia Review: In 1442, 50 years before Columbus "sailed the ocean blue," Shinto priests in Japan began keeping records of the annual freeze dates of a nearby lake. Along a Finnish river, starting in 1693, local merchants recorded the date the ice broke up each spring. These observations are among the oldest inland water ice records in human history, and now they are contributing to modern understanding of climate change.
According to a new study published in Nature Scientific Reports, the meticulous record...