The Vikings were in the United States exactly a thousand years ago

With information sixty years old, a pattern may have begun but unusual, but some may have escaped: Christopher Columbus was not the first European to set foot in the United States. About half a millennium before the Atlantic was crossed by the Genoese navigator in 1492, the Vikings landed on the Canadian island of Newfoundland, in what is now known as the Anse Ax meadows. They lived there as evidence of excavations carried out in the 1960s on charcoal and wooden frame buildings – apartments, fakes, workshops – built by the Scandinavians in Greenland and Iceland. The Ann’s Oaks Meadows, a UNESCO World Heritage Site dating back to 1978, is a major archaeological site that further testifies to the Viking expansion in the Middle Ages.

There was an important question about this American occupation: when exactly did it come to date? Consensus triggered I’s turning point^{There is} et du II^e The accounts were established after facts based on the Millennium AD, the analysis of architectural remains and a few objects, and the Nordic sagas. The limitations and uncertainties of this technique in the 1960s and 1970s date back to about fifty remnants of the past without providing accurate results: estimates have been extended since the end of the 8th century.^e The middle of the eleventh century^e. In this ambiguous context, the results of an international study Released Wednesday, October 20th Nature Has the effect of a bomb, in its accuracy and in the year mentioned: it shows that exactly a thousand years ago in 1021 the Vikings were on the Anci Ax meadow! However, they did not say when they arrived or how long they stayed.

“Chronological Anchor”

How did these researchers progress? How were we able to move from a very ambiguous position to a very sharp one? It took a helping hand from the sky … In this case, the scientists used an unknown astronomical phenomenon – sunlight, supernova? – In 993, caused the arrival of cosmic rays on Earth. Coming into the atmosphere, these energetic particles cause a layer of reactions with air atoms. Especially the conversion of nitrogen to carbon 14. It is experiencing a peak in production, as Japanese researcher Fusa Miyake studied Japanese cedar in 2012, which can be found in annual growth rings. Therefore, if one is lucky enough to have a tree cut down after a cosmic ray event, the tree ring produced that year will have more carbon-14 than its neighbors.

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