Ice Cover on Lake Balaton in Western Hungary from 1885 to 2026
Reflections on Holocene Climate Variability with Reference to Historical and Contemporary Ice Formation on Central Europe’s Largest Inland Lake Michael Hahl, Geographer 1. Introduction The Little Ice Age (LIA), whose temporal extent is commonly dated in the scientific literature to approximately 1300–1850 or 1900, has traditionally been interpreted as the result of a combination of external forcings, in particular enhanced volcanic activity and reduced solar irradiance. However, this explanatory framework alone is insufficient to fully account for the observed rapid transition from the Medieval Warm Period into a multi-centennial cold phase. In recent years, studies by Lapointe & Bradley (2021, 2025) in particular have opened up an alternative perspective: the climate system is understood as fundamentally non-linear, with the capacity for abrupt regime shifts driven explicitly by internal dynamics—specifically by ocean–atmosphere interactions and feedback mechanisms. This sh...
