The Danube Pontoon Bridge of Pest-Buda (1767-1849) as an Indicator and Victim of the Climate Change of the Little Ice Age

Traffic began flowing over the pontoon bridge connecting Pest and Buda in 1767. The pontoon bridge was rebuilt many times in the course of its 82-year history. During the winter months it could not be used because of ice flows on the river. The history of the bridge's use is relatively well doc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Global environment 2016-10, Vol.9 (2), p.458-493
Main Author: Racz, Lajos
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bridges
Climate change
Climate History
Danube River
Environmental aspects
Environmental History
Forecasts and trends
Global temperature changes
Ice
Little Ice Age
Melting
Meteorology
Other research articles
Pest-Buda
Pontoon bridges
Temperature
Time series
Weather
Winter
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Summary:Traffic began flowing over the pontoon bridge connecting Pest and Buda in 1767. The pontoon bridge was rebuilt many times in the course of its 82-year history. During the winter months it could not be used because of ice flows on the river. The history of the bridge's use is relatively well documented, with contemporary newspapers reporting regularly on events connected to the pontoon bridge's use. The bridge was dismantled at the onset of lasting cold weather and the appearance of ice on the river and only replaced after the annual thaw. We can describe the duration of cold weather in the winter impacting on the disintegration and rebuilding of the pontoon bridge as an 'outer winter' and the duration the Danube was frozen, the long cold period, as an 'inner winter'. As the two cases complement each other in several aspects, use was also made of new reports concerning the pontoon bridge in Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia) in addition to the data from the pontoon bridge of Pest-Buda. The winters of the last decade of the eighteenth and first decade of the nineteenth century were unusually mild and it is certain that the Danube did not freeze up on eleven occasions in two decades. However, from the 1810s, ice-free winters became extraordinarily rare and it is clearly visible that a new climatic regime had got underway. The transitional period fell in the 1810s as the centre of gravity of last big cooling period of the Little Ice Age, based on the mean temperature of winters, started from the middle of the 1820s and ended in the mid-1840s in the Carpathian Basin.
ISSN:1973-3739
2053-7352
DOI:10.3197/ge.2016.090207