Researchers may have found a fabled Viking sunstone
If you’ve caught the first couple episodes of the History Channel drama, ‘Vikings’, you’ll know that Ragnor uses a “sunstone” he procured from a traveler to chart the sun’s course, even during thick, overcast days. Archaeologists may have discovered such a fabled stone in the wreck of an old Viking ship at the bottom of the English Channel.
In a paper published earlier this week, a Franco-British group argued that the Alderney Crystal — a chunk of Icelandic calcite found amid a 16th century wreck at the bottom of the English Channel — worked as a kind of solar compass, allowing sailors to determine the position of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy cloud, masked by fog, or below the horizon.
That’s because of a property known as birefringence, which splits light beams in a way that can reveal the direction of their source with a high degree of accuracy. Vikings may not have grasped the physics behind the phenomenon, but that wouldn’t present a problem.
“You don’t have to understand how it works,” said Albert Le Floch, of the University in Rennes in western France. “Using it is basically easy.”
Vikings were expert navigators — using the sun, stars, mountains and even migratory whales to help guide them across the sea — but some have wondered at their ability to travel the long stretches of open water between Greenland, Iceland, and Newfoundland in modern-day Canada.
Le Floch is one of several who’ve suggested that calcite crystals were used as navigational aids for long summer days in which the sun might be hidden behind the clouds. He said the use of such crystals may have persisted into the 16th century, by which time magnetic compasses were widely used but often malfunctioned.
Le Floch noted that one Icelandic legend — the Saga of St. Olaf — appears to refer to such a crystal when it says that Olaf used a “sunstone” to verify the position of the sun on a snowy day.
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