Where Are We?

Sometimes, driving around country roads turning left and right causes the driver to, occasionally, not believe "The Navigator's" decisions on what direction or where we are! ( She's not ALWAYS right!) One fun trick is to point the hour-hand of the wristwatch at the sun. One-half-way between that point and 12 will be south. It works! So, how did those Vikings travelling across the North Atlantic day and night manage to get where they wanted to go? Not too many had a wristwatch, so what were their navigational aids? And what happens in stormy or foggy weather?

While they were near shore, the Vikings could easily follow seabirds, watch wave patterns, stars and the sun-position. Leaving the shorelines and following the normal east-west routes required some navigational skills. The sun provided the basic aide, but cloudy and foggy days, combined with stormy nights with winds changing directions would leave one to believe that some discoveries were, in fact, accidental happenings.

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One Icelandic saga describes an occasion, during stormy, snowy weather, King Olaf discussed their ship direction with Sigurd. Checking Sigurd's answer, Olaf "reached into his tunic and withdrew a stone". "Looking at the cloud-filled sky and the changing brightness of the stone as he turned it in his hand, he pointed out the direction to continue their travels". This stone is now known as a "sunstone", a stone commonly found in Iceland.

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In 1967, Thorkild Ramskou, a Danish archaeologist, speculated that Viking sunstones might have been Icelandic spar, a clear calcite crystal. Calcite acts as a prism, splitting incoming rays of light in two, known as birefrigence. This property makes the crystal light or dark when held up to light of different polarizations. Viking legends mention a stone that , when held up to the sky, revealed the position of the sun, even on overcast days or when the sun was below the horizon.

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To use the crystal, the Vikings would have held the stone up to the center of the sky ( from their perspective). When sunlight hit the crystal, that light became polarized and broken into the two beams. Researchers have found that if they put a dot on top of the crystal and look from below, two dots appear, due to the refraction of the Icelandic spar. They could then pinpoint the sun by rotating the crystal until both dots line-up and were of equal brightness. So, Olaf had a sunstone,and while rotating the crystal and balancing the light and colors, he found the position of the sun.

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The optical effect of this crystal appears to be due to reflections from the stone's property of red copper, imbedded in the form of small scales, which are hexagonal, rhombic or irregular in shape.

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All this before the age of the compass, and the well-known electronic voice of Mrs. Garmin " Turn left at the corner" and "recalculating". We've come a long way, sometimes accidentally.