Museum of Arctic and Antarctic

Winter has really arrived now in Moscow.  That's not much snow but it is freaking cold. Check out the window below: -40, which is the unique temperature that is numerically the same in both Fahrenheit and Celsius.

OK, it's a 40% discount sign.  The actual temperature this afternoon in Moscow is -18 Celsius:

In Fahrentheit that is still below 0 (a conversion page is here). Moreover, that temperature sign is in the center of Moscow, where it is warmer. In the outer regions of Moscow, such as where my apartment is located, the temperature is more like -22 Celsius.

On the topic of cold, one of the most distinctive museums in St. Petersburg is about the Arctic and Antarctic (that web link is just a description of the museum, whose actual website here has no English verison).

Of course since Russia has a lot of land around the Arctic regions, that is the part which they emphasize more in the museum (Antarctic stuff is on the smaller 2nd floor). Here is a typical fort in the museum,  from ancient Rus, that presumably is similar to one in the northerly regions of the country.

The Russians, Norwegians, and other northern European countries have been exploring Arctic regions for many years, e.g., the Danish explorer Vitus Bering explored eastern Siberia and Alaska under a  Russian flag in the 1700s.  I will focus, as the museum does, on the modern period of Arctic exploration, in which the mathematician Otto Schmidt (of Krull-Schmidt theorem fame) plays a key role.  I'm not sure which is more surprising: that someone named Otto Schmidt is Russian (and not a fake Russian like Vitus Bering; Schmidt was born in the Russian empire) or that a mathematician was also a polar explorer. It's kind of like finding out that Fourier played an important administrative role in Napoleon's expeditions to Egypt.

Schmidt led several expeditions around the Arctic in the 1930s.  One of the most famous (in Russia) is his journey on the ship Chelyuskin during 1933-1934, in which the goal was to see if a ship that is not an icebreaker can travel from the western to eastern parts of the Russian Arctic region in one shot. Here is a life preserver and part of the machinery on the ship:

The trip was technically a failure: the ship got stuck in pack ice near the Bering strait, somewhat short of its goal (Vladivostok) and eventually the pressure of the ice crushed the ship.  Everyone on board got out and they needed to be rescued.

All were rescued and the 7 people who organized that rescue were the first recipients of Hero of the Soviet Union medals. Two American pilots who helped with the rescue got Order of Lenin medals, which I imagine they did not display prominently on their resume.

Here is a special commemorative plate. It says "Hero of the Arctic Prof. O. Yu. Schmidt, director of the expedition on the Chelyuskin. From the Dmitrovskii State Porcelain Factory."

Here's a medal, which says "Director of the expedition Prof. Otto Yulevich Schmidt".

More information on the Chelyuskin expedition can be found here.

A few years later Schmidt organized an aerial journey to establish the first floating ice station (meaning the goal was to put people on a piece of moving ice and see where they go, instead of traveling through ice by ship), called  North Pole 1. Later he rescued the crew, but he did not get a Hero of the Soviet Union award. In the photo below is a bust of Schmidt. Behind him is a diagram showing the path of the drifting ice station, and above that is a quote by him calling this expedition the largest geographic study of the 20-th century... many decades before the century ended.

Here is a map of air expeditions in the Arctic during from 1936 to 1945.  Some of the Soviet planes seem to have landed in Alaska.  I wonder if they saw Sarah Palin's grandfather's house.

During World War II there were several naval battles in the Arctic region.  I think the museum display below is supposed to be a scene from Operation Wunderland (the German boat is in the background).

The museum had a life-size model housing unit for Arctic researchers in the 1960s:

The banner over the desk seems to be the name of the station.  On top of the map on the table is a slide rule.  Let's take a closer look:

I am sure this was not a K&E slide rule (I looked). On the wall is the world map.  Here is the Far East, where Korea is a single country (I have seen Soviet maps from the 1980s with one Korea):

Moving to the Antarctic, a Russian expedition was the first to make sight of Antarctica. The German navigator Fabian von Bellingshausen, sailing for the Russian czar, recorded his discovery in 1820. Here is what the museum imagines the scene looked like:

Here is a more recent Antarctic team.  I think they may have been trying to cross the continent on dogs.  I hope they weren't reduced to eating that dog food.

The Antarctic exhibit included a pole, presumably from a Soviet Antarctic station, with distances to various cities: Moscow, Leningrad, Prague, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, Kiev. The one I like the best is the tilted arrow right below the flag: the moon!