Frozen Atlantic

Got a map of currents and known voyages that shows direct crossing from tip of Greenland to North American UNLIKELY, unless along the edge of an ice pack that not longer exists in those seas!

a new web service claims to offer better mapping than Google Maps

script seemed to NOT work

How might it have actually been, paddling through breaks in moving pack ice ?

This year’s melt data graphic shows how the distance from Iceland to Vinland vicinity gets shortened when the ice pack enlarges.

Now does the weather permit? The marine prey species provide food?

Time for a different kind of rant.
Ordinary pdf files are rejected by the US Patent Office. To file a patent you must submit, but they don’t make it easy.
Adobe Acrobat 9.3 has settings under Advanced, Preflight that appear to control whether you can output the pdf/a or pdf/x files that the USPTO wants to recieve - ONLY.
They advise they are not yet compatible with 9.4 . A list of alternative programs to output in an agreeable format is given.

After some downloading and fumbling Primo pdf program seems to do it - but ONLY if you turn OFF “advanced printing”; which no one tells you, and seems counter-intuitive.

This wisdom results from 3 weeks of intermittent experimentation, but is given herewith, gratis.
Remember “free advice may only be worth what you paid for it”.

Cheers !

Archaeological evidence suggests the building of “henges”, wooden rather than stone, spread south from the Orkney Islands before 3,000 BC.

That requires populations to GET to these islands north of Britain. Thus, early boats that keep you up out of the freezing seas at least part of the time.

Such boats could be paddled, then blown west, toward Iceland. With such experience, why not go ON WEST after recovering one’s strength? Greenland ice edge marine foraging, south around the tip, north up the west coast to cross along some frozen edge in the Davis Straits, south along Vinland’s coast - looking for where vines would grow of a summer?

A NASA photo suggests that driving a modern Zodiac at any speed through razor edges of sea ice risks slicing the balloon hull.

A slow speed skin boat, however, could probe into “open” areas where prey surfaces, maybe flounders.

Very zen-like to pull an Umiak up onto a seemingly solid ice shelf - for overturning as a tent against the wind.
Now try to sleep without worry about polar bears as the ice creaks and the whales blow.

Representations of the ice edge east of Greenland are too smooth - tending toward a median.
Cryosphere’s frame for Jan 3, 2011 shows how jaggedy the truth can be.

At a lower sea level, and some ice build out from Iceland’s peninsular shore the “open water” might have been even less than the current 75 mile estimate.

During the Little Ice Age Inuit were seen paddling skin boats off the coast of Britain. So they could have negotiated iceberg filled seas in earlier ages, and closer to their Greenland coastal haunts.

A recent discussion of ice-loss in Greenland featured this graphic.

It also supports an arguable route of skin boat sailors subsisting on marine and coastal predation as they work their way west, eventually encountering and maybe settling in North America.

In the absence of hell freezing over, where WOULD the sea freeze if currently warming conditions reversed?

The Danish Meteorological service shows this visual construction of recent sub-surface temperatures in the strait between Greenland and Iceland.

This is similar to the surface slush / ice picture a couple of posts ago… and about where any purported ice front needs to be for marine foraging humans in skin boats to find food and occasional overnight pull-out points, if they were to reach the east coast of Greenland.

If they knew they wanted to migrate…

What would impel them? Following the setting sun?

So much we have to project without data. But some trends like this are suggestive - even supportive.