How Human Error Led the Vikings to Canada
By Tom Metcalfe, Live Science Contributor | April 12, 2018 06:54am ET
Viking navigators guided by mysterious crystal "sunstones" may have accidentally sailed on to the mainland of North America while looking for Greenland, according to new research.
The new study shows that so-called sunstones — crystals of translucent minerals like Iceland spar, which split the polarization of light passing through them — would have been "surprisingly successful" as navigation devices, by revealing the position of the sun on cloudy days, a common occurrence in the North Atlantic Ocean.
https://www.livescience.com/62284-how-vikings-reached-canada.html
