This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Christopher Intagliata.Exactly 1,000 years ago, in the year 1021, a Viking or two or three likely wandered around the very northern tip of Newfoundland, cutting down trees ...... for clearing a particular spot or for gathering wood that might have been used as timber for construction or for boat repair.They were very careful to make sure their ships were seaworthy.Michael Dee is a geoscientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.He says it's not news that the Vikings made it to North America around this time.Scientists and scholars have surmised as much from archaeological remains in Newfoundland and by scrutinizing ancient texts like the Icelandic sagas.One is not really sure how literal one can take the Icelandic sagas.They contain a lot of not only inaccuracies, a lot of things that are obviously fantastical―things like dead people speaking to them, and so on.But now Dee and his colleagues have been able to come up with a precise date―the year 1021―based on evidence these Norse visitors left behind: specifically, a stump, a log and a branch.Wood anatomists have determined that certain surfaces of that wood must have been cut by metal blades―a Viking technology the local Indigenous people are not known to have shared.And Dee’s team was able to use a cosmic occurrence―an extraordinary shower of high-energy particles from space around the year 993―to date the felling of the trees.
