The carbon study 14 in wooden objects carved by metal tools suggests that the handle to the Meadows, in Newfoundland, was occupied by Scandinavians in 1021.
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Let’s start, once is not custom, by an old-year-old information but who, although capital, may have further escaped some: Christopher Columbus is not the first European to have set foot. in America. About half millennium before the Atlantic Celebration Crossing the Genoese Navigator in 1492, Vikings had landed on the Canadian Island of Newfoundland, in a place today called the Anse to Meadows. They had also lived there, as shown by excavations made in the 1960s, which upgraded the remnants of peat and woodworking buildings – dwellings, forge, workshops – such as the Scandinavians built in Greenland and In Iceland. Registered since 1978 on the UNESCO World Heritage List, Anse to Meadows is a major archaeological site, additional testimony of Viking expansion in the Middle Ages.
An important question remained on this American occupation: when did it exactly? The consensus referred to the turn of the i and of the millennium of our era, based on the analysis of architectural remnants and a handful of objects, As well as on the northern sagas, stories established long after the assumed facts. The dating of about fifty remains had been attempted in the past without giving precise results given the limitations and uncertainties of this technique in the 1960s and 1970s: the estimates ranged from the end of VIII e century in the middle of the XI e . In this context of blur, the result of an international study published Wednesday, October 20 in nature does the effect of a bomb, both by its precision and the year that is mentioned: it shows that the Vikings were present at the handle At Meadows in 1021, there is a thousand years ago! However, that does not say when they arrived or how long they stayed.
“Chronological Anchor”
How did these researchers proceed? How did we manage to move from very vague to very sharp? It took a shot of the sky … In this case, scientists took advantage of an unknown astrophysical event – solar eruption, supernova? – Who, in 993, caused an influx of cosmic rays on earth. Arriving in the atmosphere, these very energetic particles cause waterfalls of reactions with the air atoms. And in particular a transmutation of carbon nitrogen 14. This one knows a peak of production which, as demonstrated in 2012 the Nippone Fusa Miyake researcher by studying Japanese cedars, can be found in annual growthunes of growth. trees. Therefore, if we have the chance to have wood that has been cut after a cosmic ray event, the cerline produces that year will contain much more carbon than its neighbors.
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