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Is there any way to have known, back in medieval times, that there were two massive continents across the Atlantic ocean?
I was just thinking about the popular image of Columbus. How he was this irrational madman, who believed in almost his own totally wrong calculations about the size of the Earth, when everyone already knew the true size and that he had no hope of making it all the way to India by sailing west. By pure dumb luck, he stumbled upon the New World and the rest is history. What a lucksack. Although some will admit that he was an excellent sailor, who had read widely in the astronomy and geography of his era, and carefully planned his route to use the trade winds.
If that continent didn't exist, it seems like it would substantially alter the Earth's climate. There would be nothing to stop the wind and tides from going all across the Pacific and Atlantic, so you'd have much stronger winds and storms. East Asia and West Africa would be absolutely rocked by massive storms. Instead of a useful express route, the trade winds might be way too strong to be used by ships of the time. Earth would wobble more, with it's mass much more uneven, causing a larger seasonal change. Whales could freely migrate from East Asia to Western Europe, but not much else could cross the distance. But maybe some artifacts like float all the way across by chance.
I don't know, I haven't really thought this through seriously. It's just fun to think about how that would affect the Earth's climate, and if it's possible for a gifted navigator of that time to actually realize that there must be something out there. Apparently the polynesians could find islands by looking for birds or clouds in the sky from long distances, so people really were interested in this sort of long distance exploration.
I’m going to go with “no.”
Not that people weren’t interested, but the distances involved are just so much more than you might realize. A very tall thunderstorm with its top at 20 km might be visible from 500 km. The Galápagos Islands are 900 km off South America, and were discovered only by drifting off course. The Atlantic is 3-5,000 km across.
You won’t have any luck from wobble, either. The Earth’s crust represents the outer 20 km of our 6,371 km orb. Distributing that skin slightly differently isn’t going to change the orbital mechanics. We can confirm this because, well, we’ve tried it. Previous geological eras saw completely different continental arrangements, including one mega continent paired with a mega ocean.
Which leaves us with the wind. I…think you might be on to something here? I don’t know nearly enough about the current macro-scale winds to say. Does the polar jet stream count? Does it have a bigger companion over the Atlantic or Pacific? Ultimately, I’m going to guess they didn’t have the data to estimate ocean size based on wind.
Sure, I'm not suggesting that anyone could literally look across the Atlantic and see something directly. Just that humans were always fascinated by the idea of unknown land masses, and were using some pretty extreme methods to try to find it.
I guess what I was thinking for Columbus was that he could compare the wind and currents of the Mediterranean, North Sea, and Eastern Atlantic (and maybe some vague rumors about the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans). It's enough to see that the larger bodies have stronger winds and currents. Everyone knew to stay close to shore in the Atlantic because once you go out there the storms are rough. But he might have had some instinctual understanding as a sailor like "hmm, this is rough but it's not that much rougher than the Mediterranean. if this was really a 20,000 foot nonstop Ocean all the way to East Asia, the storms would be much worse." or even measuring the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta_do_mar and seeing how it seems to loop in the central Atlantic, in a much tighter loop than you'd get if it was all one big ocean.
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