CBC News' Lindsay Bird reports on an odd Viking inheritance.

Say it on your inhale: "yeeeeeeeah ( Read more... )

CBC News' Lindsay Bird reports on the continued but--so far--fruitless search for Viking artifacts in southwestern Newfoundland's Point Rosee.

On a meadowy spit of oceanfront land in southwestern Newfoundland, a team of scientists spent part of the summer of 2016 working to both uncover history and make it, modern explorers trying to track down ( Read more... )

• blogTO notes this weekend is going to be warm.
• Centauri Dreams looks at moons of the dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt.
• Dangerous Minds looks at some photos of American malls taken in the late 1980s.
• The Dragon's Gaze notes a white dwarf that stole so much matter from its stellar partner to make it a brown dwarf.
• The Dragon's Tales notes Greenland may ( Read more... )

Last December, I wrote a short blog post about the latest study on the Greenland climate during the Norse era, suggesting that the temperature wasn't that much warmer than now. This, as was noted at the time, had substantial implications for the conventional model of Greenland's failure, and Vinland's abortive birth.

Climate change has often been ( Read more... )

Norse Greenland, the five centuries between the discovery of Greenland by Viking explorers in the 10th century and the end of the colony they founded some time in the 15th century, has always been an interest of mine. The idea of an earlier crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, one predating Christopher Columbus, has long interested alternate historians ( Read more... )

Torontoist's Kevin Plummer looks at the strange history of the Beardmore Relics, an alleged cache of Viking artifacts found in the middle of Ontario. That the cache seems to have been a hoax seems established. The interesting question is how it came about.

Tucked in the European galleries on the third floor of the Royal Ontario Museum, there is a ( Read more... )

Via io9 I came across a (translated) article in Der Spiegel by one Günther Stockinger dealing with the mystery of what happened to Viking Greenland. The answer is almost surprisingly non-catastrophic: the Viking Greenlanders actually did cope successfully with the cooling climate of their homeland, but when things became too severe they returned to ( Read more... )

The headline of Traci Watson's National Geographic News article sensationalizes the news a bit--it would have been a one-time migration to Iceland, on medieval Europe's extreme western periphery, and the effects are limited to Iceland--but it's still fascinating to think that there might have been pre-Columbian migration between the two hemispheres ( Read more... )