The sunstone and polarised skylight: ancient Viking navigational tools?

Abstract

Although the polarisation of the light was discovered at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Vikings could have used the polarised light around the tenth century in their navigation to America, using a ‘sunstone’ evoked in the Icelandic Sagas. Indeed, the birefringence of the Iceland spar (calcite), a common crystal in Scandinavia, permits a simple observation of the axis of polarisation of the skylight at the zenith. From this, it is possible to guess the azimuth of a hidden Sun below the horizon, for instance. The high sensitivity of the differential method provided by the ordinary and extraordinary beams of calcite at its so-called isotropy point is about two orders higher than that of the best dichroic polariser and permits to reach an accuracy of  ±1° for the Sun azimuth (at sunrise and sunset). Unfortunately, due to the relative fragility of calcite, only the so-called Alderney crystal was discovered on board a 16th ancient ship. Curiously, beyond its use as a sunstone by the Vikings, during these last millennia calcite has led to the discovery of the polarisation of the light itself by Malus and is currently being used to detect the atmospheres of exoplanets. Moreover, the differential method for the light polarisation detection is widely used in the animal world.

Keywords:

• polarisation
• birefringence
• Haidinger’s brushes
• isotropy point
• Vikings
• Navigation
• vision

Acknowledgements

The authors thank HRH, The Duke of York, the Patron of the Alderney Maritime Trust for his support and the members of the Alderney Maritime Trust for their collaboration. We would like also to thank J. Enoch and J. Lucas for their fruitful discussions and C. and A. Perrin for providing us with electron microscopy photos of ultra-small calcite fragments.