Solar storm confirms Vikings settled in North America exactly 1,000 years ago

Analysis of wood from timber-framed buildings in Newfoundland shows Norse-built settlement 471 years before Columbus

Half a millennium before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, the Vikings reached the New World", as the remains of timber buildings at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Canada's Newfoundland testify.

The Icelandic sagas - oral histories written down hundreds of years later - tell of a leader named Leif Erikson and a settlement called Vinland", assumed to be coastal North America. But while it is known that the Norse landed in Canada, exactly when they set up camp to become the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic, marking the moment when the globe was first known to have been encircled by humans, has remained imprecise.