Far North Mysteries

 I start today with the skull of a mammoth.

This depicts the Jefferson's ground sloth, a three meter long animal that died out after the last ice age.

Another animal that passed into history after the ice age- the short haired bear, even bigger than the polar bear.

This is a contemporary sculpture, Inuit style. The snowmobile has become an essential part of life in the Arctic.

A large three dimensional map of the top of the world is here, with various lines denoting things like the tree line, but the most important line is in white- the Arctic Circle.

The Canadian Arctic Expedition was an extensive scientific mission into the Arctic from 1913-18 to document the Far North. Some of its artifacts are seen here.

An earlier voyage into the North, and one that met with disaster- the Franklin Expedition. John Franklin was commissioned to take two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, in search of the Northwest Passage. These artifacts were found on King William Island in the 1990s, remnants of that expedition, one of the great mysteries of all times. The sunken wrecks of the ships were only found in the last decade in cold Arctic waters, with the assistance of Inuit people. While some graves of the Franklin Expedition were discovered during the many searches for them, John Franklin himself has never been found.

Here we have Nunami, by Taqralik Partridge. This is a traditional amautik, a woman's parka of the Inuit. It is paired with two sculptures below.

Photographs rotate through of life in the Far North.