In this compelling university museum, the trials, victories and tragic mistakes of such great Polar explorers as Roald Amundsen, Ernest Shackleton and Captain Scott are powerfully evoked, using paintings, photographs, equipment, maps, journals and even last messages left for loved ones.
Other exhibits include models of ships that ventured into sub-zero Arctic and Antarctic waters, innovative equipment such as the "Nansen cooker" and interactive displays on ice and climate change. There's an interesting section devoted to the people of the Arctic, with Inuit carvings and scrimshaw (etched bones), a Sami knife with a carved reindeer-horn sheath, a walrus tusk etched with hunt scenes and particularly fine examples of tupilak (carved caribou-horn figures with ancestor souls captured inside) from Greenland. The museum is run by the Scott Polar Institute, founded with part of the relief fund set up in the wake of the explorer’s ill-fated South Pole expedition.
