鈥淎rt never expresses anything but itself,鈥� said Oscar Wilde. Not so. It transpires that an ancient map of the North Atlantic drawn over 450 years ago almost perfectly represents the ocean currents and eddies that swirl today.
The discovery has astonished oceanographers. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e the earliest known description of large eddies in the ocean,鈥� says Tom Rossby of the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. 鈥淭heir size, location and spacing seem too deliberate to be purely artistic expression.鈥�
The map is the ancient Carta Marina of the north-east Atlantic, published in 1539 by Olaus Magnus, an exiled Swedish priest living in Italy. Rossby realised that its decorative whirls and eddies corresponded to eddies seen in thermal satellite images taken of the 鈥淚celand-Faroes Front鈥� where cold Arctic water meets warm northbound water in the Gulf Stream (Oceanography, vol 16, p 77).
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Rossby thinks that the artist gleaned his information from traders and mariners who sailed the North Atlantic.