“Art never expresses anything but itself,” 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. “They’re the earliest known description of large eddies in the ocean,” says Tom Rossby of the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. “Their size, location and spacing seem too deliberate to be purely artistic expression.”
The map is the ancient Carta Marina of the north-east Atlantic, published in 1539 by Olaus Magnus, an exiled Swedish priest living in…
