Crystal Clear Navigation

I came across this article, about how the Norse may have used crystals to navigate with, while reading a bit in the HeathenNews forum (in my Selected Links page), and thought I’d pass it along in the blogosphere. The process being described here, birefringence, is fully explained in this entry in Wikipedia. Essentially, it is this optical property (along with polarization of light), that researchers have determined will work on cloudy days, that the Norse may have possibly utilized in their navigation (knowing where the Sun was at in the sky would have given them an accurate idea of their position), enabling them to ply the gloomy and stormy North Sea and North Atlantic. In some places, I’ve written about how the Norse culture was able to embrace Nature and technology simultaneously – if this method of navigation could ever be proven to have been used by the Norse, it would be a splendid example of this seemingly paradoxical approach.