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Australia and New Zealand

Its location in the Southern Hemisphere made Australia not experience a regional cooling like that of Europe or North America. Instead, the Australian Little Ice Age was characterized by humid, rainy climates, which were followed by drying and aridification in the 19th century.

As studied by Tibby et al. (2018), lake records from Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland suggest that conditions in the east and the south-east of Australia were wet and unusually cool from the 16th to the early 19th centuries. That corresponds with the “peak” of the global Little Ice Age from 1594 to 1722. For example, North Stradbroke Island's Swallow Lagoon data reveals a period of persistent wetness from 1500 to 1850 CE (exceeding 300 mm above average), followed by a significant decrease in rainfall after 1891. The rainfalls significantly reduced after around 1890. Similarly, the hydrological records of Lake Surprise's salinity levels reveal high humidity levels around from 1440 to 1880, and an increase in salinity from 1860 to 1880 points to a negative change to the once-humid climate. The mid-19th century marked a notable change to eastern Australia's rainfall and humidity patterns.

Tibby et al. (2018) note that in eastern Australia, the paleoclimatic changes of the Little Ice Age in the late 1800s coincided with the agricultural changes resulting from European colonization. After the 1788 establishment of British colonies in the Australia, which were concentrated primarily in the eastern regions and cities like Sydney and later Melbourne and Brisbane, the British introduced new agricultural practices like pastoralism. Such practices required widespread deforestation and clearance of vegetation. Pastoralism and the clearing of land are captured in works of art such as the 1833 painting by the prominent landscape artist John Glover Patterdale Landscape with Cattle.

Over the next century, the deforestation led to a loss of biodiversity, wind and water-based soil erosion, and soil salinity. Furthermore, as argued by Gordan et al. (2003), such land and vegetation clearance in Australia resulted in a 10% reduction in the transport of water vapor to the atmosphere. That occurred in Western Australia as well, where 19th-century land clearing resulted in reduced rainfall over the region. By 1850 to 1890, those human agricultural practices, which were concentrated in eastern Australia, had most likely amplified the drying and aridification that marked the end of the Little Ice Age.

In the north, evidence suggests fairly dry conditions, but coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef show rainfall similar to today but with less variability. A study that analyzed isotopes in Great Barrier Reef corals suggested that increased water vapor transport from the southern tropical oceans to the poles contributed to the Little Ice Age. Borehole reconstructions from Australia suggest that over the last 500 years, the 17th century was the coldest on the continent. The borehole temperature reconstruction method further indicates that the warming of Australia over the past five centuries is only around half that of the warming experienced by the Northern Hemisphere, which further proves that Australia did not reach the same depths of cooling as the continents in the north.

On the west coast of the Southern Alps of New Zealand, the Franz Josef Glacier advanced rapidly during the Little Ice Age and reached its maximum extent in the early 18th century. That was one of the few cases of a glacier thrusting into a rainforest. Evidence suggests, corroborated by tree ring proxy data, that the glacier contributed to a −0.56 °C (−1.01 °F) temperature anomaly over the course of the Little Ice Age in New Zealand. Based on dating of a yellow-green lichen of the Rhizocarpon subgenus, the Mueller Glacier, on the eastern flank of the Southern Alps within Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park, is considered to have been at its maximum extent between 1725 and 1730.