Ancient solar storm pinpoints Viking settlement in Americas exactly 1,000 years ago - National Geographic
An analysis of wood from L’Anse aux Meadows zeroes in on a cosmic event to reveal that the European seafarers were felling trees in Newfoundland in A.D.
Since the discovery of a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Canada's Newfoundland more than 50 years ago, most scholars accept that Viking sailors, who explored the seas beginning in the late 700s to around 1100, were the first Europeans to reach the Americas.Based on artifact finds, radiocarbon dating, and Viking sagas, the settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows was thought to have briefly thrived somewhere between 990 and 1050.
Besides providing the first exact date for Viking settlement in North America, the dates also provide confirmation for tales of early voyages written down hundreds of years after the fact.Dozens of radiocarbon dates taken from wooden artifacts excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s showed the site was about 1,000 years old.
She and Michael Dee, a radiocarbon dating expert also at the University of Groningen, were searching for sites to test a new dating method based on tree rings.
The cosmic storm, along with a similar event in 775, left behind “spikes” that skew radiocarbon dates from wood by about a century, a fact that researchers first identified in 2012.Identifiable only by comparing radiocarbon dates from individual tree rings, the resulting anomaly creates a sort of tree ring time stamp.
The team painstakingly sampled and radiocarbon dated more than 100 tree rings, some less than a millimeter wide, hoping to find the 993 spike in the radiocarbon age.“The [previous] radiocarbon dates stretch between the beginning and the end of the Viking Age,” says Dee.Furthermore, this date corroborates two Icelandic sagas, the “Saga of the Greenlanders” and the “Saga of Erik the Red,” that recorded attempts to establish a permanent settlement in “Vinland” on the far western edge of the Viking world.