An animated globe on the wall shows a lovely, generous white snow cap over the North Pole and theĚýArctic in 1979 that shrinks, then shrinks and shrinks again until by 2100 it is a mere fingerprint, skimming the top of Greenland and the farthest tip of the Canadian archipelago.

This apocalyptic introduction greets visitors at the start of the British Museum’s latest exhibition, Arctic: Culture and Climate. It is a clear and sobering reminder of the other imminent emergency we face, but this exhibition is more about the hope found in human resilience and adaptation, and cultural change in the face of disaster.

There is another message, too, for a world constrained by covid-19 and increasingly mediated by screens. After scant contact with the outside world for months, the show reminds visitors that they are still primarily physical beings – beings with the power to destroy the planet as much as to cherish it.

Today, nearly 400,000 Indigenous People still live within the Arctic. Over the past 30,000 years, their ancestors survived extreme and rapidly changing conditions, including the end of the last glacial maximum and the effects of colonialism.

Amber Lincoln, the exhibition’s lead curator at the British Museum, wants visitors to come away with a fresh appreciation for the people who live in the Arctic and for their stories – going beyond the statistics to lives that are being affected by climate change.

The show’s historical artefacts, artworks, starkly beautiful photographs and immersive videos combine seamlessly to tell their stories. All this is set against a very effective light and soundscape, which creates the changing light and sound of the Arctic year – each month lasts 2 minutes and fades into the next so the scene appears to be in a state of constant change.

When the Arctic shrinks

Indigenous communities are found across the Arctic, from the northern reaches of Scandinavia and Siberia to Greenland and the northern vistas of Canada and Alaska. Their way of life now faces even greater upheaval as the Arctic has lost 75 per cent of its sea ice in the past 50 years, and the permafrost that acts as bedrock has started to melt.

One photo shows an underground ice cellar deep in the permafrost, which is used by the Inupiat of northern Alaska to preserve whale meat. Once the permafrost melts, such underground fridges may no longer be available.

Elsewhere, a 19^th-century belt, a knife and hanging bags for amulets and tobacco that would have belonged to reindeer herders such as the Khanty or Nenets of Russia are springboards to talk about the less expected effects of climate change on the region. It isn’t only shrinking Arctic ecosystems: in 2016, some 2350 reindeer on the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia died after eating anthrax spores released by the melting permafrost.

Even one of the most beautiful exhibits – a commissioned work by Sakha artist Fedor Markow to show the spring solstice celebrations of the Sakha people of north-east Russia – resonates with the theme of changing weather and its importance in the Arctic.

The miniature model, drawing on traditional carvings, is exquisitely chiselled from mammoth ivory (with special permission, of course). Ivory from woolly mammoths is becoming more available as Arctic ground melts and releases its frozen treasures.

Most striking is the incredible sustainability and respect for nature of the communities – something long lost elsewhere in the world. While caribou, walruses, seals and whales are still hunted, every scrap of flesh, bone, baleen, sinew and skin is used for something.

An astonishing whaling suit that belonged to a Kalaallit hunter in Greenland in the early 19^th century – the only one of its kind – shows what people could do with sealskin. Waterproof and inflatable, it would have provided warmth and buoyancy to the wearer, jumping from his boat directly onto a sleeping whale to harpoon it, according to the caption.

Another sustainable highlight is a bag made of fish skin. As Lincoln asks: “Who would have thought salmon skin could be so durable and beautiful?”

Arctic: Culture and Climate is a great exhibition, but some of my enjoyment comes from a rare opportunity to experience the wonderful corporeality of life unmediated by a screen. For a short while, I could feel something of Arctic life, through the sounds of an ice-bound world, light like nowhere else – and just marvel at some incredibly clever clothes fashioned from sealskin and fur.

The exhibition has clear lessons about the mindset of people working with nature: everything, from animals to the ice itself, becomes a living, connected part of the daily world, not a separated-off area of entitlement and exploitation.

In a world where so much human experience has been forced online, such shows are the more valuable for reminding us about our physical nature and that there is a real world to fight for.

Shaoni Bhattacharya is a consultant for żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ based in London

Ěýis at the British Museum from 22 October 2020 to 21 February 2021

“New ways of child-rearing can leave many as kidults, ill-prepared to enter a complicated, adult world”

“In Connecticut, teachers are banned from marking work with red ink to avoid damaging self-esteem”

Telling the story of the most tragic and fatal Royal Navy expedition that ventured into the Arctic could have turned into a Victorian penny dreadful. Luckily, the curators of Death in the Ice had smarter things in mind.

The new exhibition at London’s National Maritime Museum (NMM) deftly captures the complexity of Sir John Franklin’s disastrous final polar expedition through multiple narratives, exposing the viewpoints of the players, the historical and scientific evidence – and the theories tying the findings together.

So what do we know about what happened to Franklin, his 128 men and their two ships when they disappeared in the Canadian Arctic 170 years ago?

In May 1845, two of the British Royal Navy’s finest, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, set sail from England in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, the route joining the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

In July, the ships docked in the Whale Fish Islands, off the west coast of Greenland. The men sent what were to be their last letters, and hauled three years’ worth of provisions aboard. On 26 July, the vessels were seen by whalers off the coast of Baffin Island.

Then, nothing. No one expected to hear for a while, but with no word nor sightings for years, searches began.

Franklin, a veteran of the polar seas, had been on three previous Arctic voyages and had written . His wife Jane was a strong and adventurous personality herself, who had travelled widely, and her fortitude was to prove significant in the searches for the missing expedition.

Intensely human story

But we still don’t know exactly what happened after those last sightings, says one of the show’s curators, Karen Ryan from the Canadian Museum of History, which worked on the exhibition with the NMM and Parks Canada, in collaboration with the Government of Nunavut and the Inuit Heritage Trust. For Ryan, it’s an intensely human story of 129 men “full of dreams, full of ambitions and full of hope… they had names, families that missed them”.

The discoveries by of HMS Erebus in September 2014 and HMS Terror in September 2016 – both of them submerged yet largely pristine – only add to the mystery.

Did the sailors perish from scurvy? From lead poisoning off the tin cans that contained their food? Did they get botulism from the meat? Or did they starve to death as they abandoned ship? Worst of all, had they become cannibals?

The first exhibit is a leather shoe found lying on the exposed deck of HMS Erebus, and displayed in a glass box set against a watery wall of undersea footage. It’s a smart shoe, clearly unsuited to the Arctic, but its unknown owner brought it anyway, improvising for the freezing conditions by stuffing it with seal fur. Traces of DNA have also been found in it, explained Marc-André Bernier, underwater archaeology manager at Parks Canada.

On the walls of a room resembling an officers’ mess are snippets of journal entries and the crew’s letters home, detailing life at sea. We learn of Saturday night merriment, of a library aboard HMS Terror boasting as many as 1200 volumes, and that the pet monkey aboard HMS Erebus was a fondly regarded nuisance.

There are explicit reminders too that this was an age of scientific exploration. Harry Goodsir, a scientist aboard HMS Erebus, published work on a new copepod species from the Arctic, says Ryan. And on display is equipment for research on the geomagnetic north pole.

The accounts are often painfully vivid. “Goodsir is catching the most extraordinary animals in a net, and is in ecstasies,” wrote Commander James Fitzjames of HMS Erebus and its crew in his journal. “Gore and Des Voeux are over the side, poking with nets and long poles, with cigars in their mouths, and Osmer is laughing.”

Oral histories

A major space is devoted to Inuit oral histories, which eventually played a big part in advancing the story. Their accounts of their sightings of ships and men, not to mention dismembered bones, helped piece together some of what had happened. For years, though, the Inuit reports were either discounted or not taken as seriously as other evidence. But in the end, they carried the day.

Then there is the social and cultural overlay. By the 1840s, polar exploration was refracted through everything, from literature (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) to wonderfully outlandish plates showing Arctic scenes of explorers meeting Inuits, their edges adorned with such improbable Artic creatures as tigers and lions.

The explorers were the celebrities of the age, as Staffordshire china figurines of Franklin and his wife illustrate. In fact, it was the tough-minded Jane who, troubled by the lack of sightings, forced many search missions. Between 1847 and 1880, more than 30 took place.

By 1854, Rae had made some progress, but in an age of polar heroes, the news he brought back to England was not welcome – especially the Inuit accounts that some of the crew had become cannibals.

These were furiously denied by Jane Franklin and Charles Dickens, who had written articles questioning the Inuit accounts that fuelled a very public debate. But thanks to Rae, an 1859 expedition found crucial evidence backing Inuit accounts at Victory Point on King William Island.

A handwritten note by one of the crew concluded “All well”, but scrawled in the margins is a later second note saying that the ships had been ice-bound since September 1846, and then abandoned in April 1848 as 105 men set off to find Back’s River. It said that 24 men had died, including Franklin.

Forensic clues

What happened next is still unknown. But forensic scientists now have good clues, including tinned meat samples, which tested negative for botulism. Science seems to back the Inuit stories of finding human bones that looked suspiciously like they had been cut: about a quarter of the bones found have markings consistent with butchery; others seem to have been cracked open and boiled to extract marrow.

This is grisly, but clinical enough not to be too traumatic – unlike the sight of three sailors who died in the first winter and were known to be buried on Beechey Island.

Their bodies were exhumed in the 1980s, and now, in a separated-off room so the squeamish can avoid it, are three open caskets with superimposed images that look eerily real, as though you are staring into the faces of men who died 170 years ago, preserved from the day they were buried, clothes, facial grimaces and all. The effect is sobering.

Today, findings are coming in thick and fast from HMS Erebus – artefacts include the ship’s bell. And Death in the Ice has a small nod to the investigations of HMS Terror, discovered after the exhibition – two years in the making – had been finished.

The ships were found in a different location from where accounts suggested they would be. For Bernier, this reopens the whole interpretation: “What happened in between?” he asks.

In fact, the changed location suggests the men might have reboarded the ships, then deserted them a second time after sailing some way. Bernier’s team has already completed extensive underwater archaeological work on HMS Erebus and is planning to send robots into the wreck soon. HMS Terror will doubtless yield more clues.

In the end, those who like their mysteries tied up neatly may leave the show dissatisfied. But for those intrigued by the twists and turns of multiple narratives, conflicting or confirming each other as they unfold, this epic more than delivers.

is on at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, until 7 January, and at the Canadian Museum of History from March 2018

It’s not every day you see a red carpet being rolled out in front of the grand entrance to London’s Natural History Museum. “We’re trying to keep it clean for later,” said an official as I gingerly avoided the people fixing it in place and the hovering cleaning staff.

Apart from this feverish activity, and the bleary eyes of museum staff who started work at 4 am, itĚý was strangely empty for somewhere normally rammed with visitors. Thursday 13 July was clearly a very special occasion: that evening science royalty (David Attenborough) and real royalty (the Duchess of Cambridge) were expected at a dinner to celebrate the unveiling of Hope, the museum’s spectacular new centrepiece in its Hintze Hall entrance gallery.

Luckily, it’s worth all the fuss. Hope is a 25.2-metre long skeleton of a blue whale, all 4 tonnes suspended in mid-air from the Victorian museum’s high vaulted ceiling.

I was there to review the latest exhibition, but I was hijacked by the majestic Hope, who seemed to dive straight at me through the large glass doors.

This is no accident. She is in a lunge-feeding dive mode, says Lorraine Cornish, head of conservation at the NHM, who has worked on the project for three-and-a-half years.

Hefty mandibles

Hope has her hefty mandibles open and is off-centre to help recreate the moment when blue whales corkscrew in to capture krill. “It was a really challenging pose to get her in, but we wanted to be scientifically accurate and make her dynamic in the space,” says Cornish.

Suspending such a formidable beast from the ceiling took the expertise of mathematicians and structural engineers. At her lowest point, Hope’s open mandibles are about 4.2 metres above the floor, while her highest tip is about 13.5 metres high.

How could you miss such a behemoth? Visitors may well have walked past the work dozens of times. She had been on view at the museum since 1934, hanging above a life-sized model of another venerable blue whale until October 2015 when the work to move her started.

Hope was taken down piece by piece. After 10 months in a pop-up lab at the NHM, she was moved to a secret location for conservation work: an adapted aircraft hangar near Bicester, in Oxfordshire.

The team used lidar scanning to create a 1.5-metre-long 3D printout of Hope to work out how to articulate her skeleton. They also used high-resolution scanners, and did CT scans of her tail section to gather data.

But the amazing Hope and a revamped Hintze Hall also mark a new era for the NHM. The east side of the hall will now house extinct species and early life – including a mastodon and fossilised trees (see above), while the west will present the diversity of life from giraffes, through seaweed, to a big blue marlin.

Moving to the new whales exhibition, it’s clearly targeted at families during the summer holidays. As such it should hold their attention with fascinating specimens including the skeleton of the tragic whale that lost its way in London’s Thames river in 2006, the vertebra of a massive blue whale, and jars containing strange pickled humpback whale fetuses at different stages of development.

The show explains many aspects of the marine mammals as they evolved from small land animals 50 million years ago, to their extraordinary ability to use echolocation, and their cultural and social complexities.

But launching at the same time as Hope means that the exhibition can’t really compete – unless you start there and leave Hope until the end. After all, what can match a whopping 4-tonne skeleton diving right at you, mouth agape?

Cornish hopes visitors will take home another message. Once abundant, blue whales were hunted down to just 500 individuals, but a 1960s’ commercial whaling ban meant they have bounced back to healthier numbers of around 20,000.

“We were one species which almost annihilated another, and we have brought them back from the brink,” she says. “Tread lightly.”

Hintze Hall and Whales: Beneath the surface are open to the public from 14 July

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Middle-aged raver

Nuclear-powered play

THE science of mass death is no easy thing to read or write about. It can, however, give us valuable insights into the way politics, technology and a flood of grief can alter our perceptions of how we treat the dead. Who Owns the Dead? does just that, 15 years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 on the World Trade Center in New York.

Its publication also comes amid more controversy stemming from the attacks – as US president Barack Obama and Congress wrangle over a bill that would allow the 9/11 families to sue the Saudi Arabian government over alleged support of the terrorists.

“This book is not for the faint of heart,” the author Jay Aronson warns at the outset. Aronson, director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, gives a harrowing account. First he looks at the retrieval of body parts and identifying who they belong to. Then he delves into how science intersects with politics and the issue of memorialising the dead.

One thing is certain: 9/11 was unprecedented on many levels. An estimated 2753 people were killed at the World Trade Center site. Just 293 bodies were found intact, and 21,900 pieces were recovered from the debris. Despite the most costly forensic investigation in US history ($80 million so far), the remains of 1113 people are unidentified.

But that some 60 per cent of victims have been identified illustrates the growing potential of DNA technology for mass identification and the painstaking efforts of those involved. It had been used before for identifying bodies in mass graves, for example after the 1990s genocide in Bosnia and for first world war soldiers, but nothing on the scale or complexity of ground zero.

Days after the attack, New York’s mayor, Rudy Giuliani, announced there was little hope of finding more survivors, but pledged that the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) would do “whatever it took to identify the source of every single human remain recovered from the WTC site, no matter how small”.

“Despite the most costly forensic investigation in US history, 1113 victims remain unidentified“

This pledge changed forensic history, upending the “identify all victims” approach investigators had used. It meant the OCME had to keep going until every last fragment of human material was paired with a person, or it had reached the limits of technology.

Those unidentified remains are now housed below ground in a repository behind the National September 11 Memorial Museum in a climate-controlled environment so that one day improved technology will finally identify them.

Aronson’s account describes the recovery efforts amid the pandemonium after the attack. This is sad, horrifying and often gruesome, but it is a story worth hearing as Aronson gives us a sense of the confusing, painful and Herculean effort involved in the most basic identification.

We learn how some first responders tried to “reconstruct” bodies, often mingling remains from different people in one body bag. He tells how the blast meant that sometimes parts from one person ended up inside the body cavity of another. And how the different authorities failed to coordinate on the most basic levels, adding to the confusion.

The inexperience of the New York Police Department in mass gathering of information and biological samples made the OCME’s job harder, because the collection of DNA samples was haphazard and didn’t follow protocols. And although initial recovery efforts focused on the 16-acre site of the World Trade Center, for years afterwards, body parts were still being found in vent shafts, roofs and on ledges of neighbouring buildings.

It is a hard read – partly because of the devastating subject, but also because of the exhausting toing and froing between committees and subcommittees, the “human remains activist” groups and authorities.

The way the dead were to be memorialised was the source of much controversy, echoing the question in the book’s title. There are no easy answers, although the way we treat the dead has all kinds of implications. As Aronson says: “Human remains have political, cultural and emotional power.” Readers can only imagine the prolonged agony of the 9/11 families and empathise with their desire to know what happened.

The identification efforts after 9/11 were about separating the US from the perpetrators: emphasis on the individual was in marked contrast to the terrorists’ callous disregard for life. As Aronson says: “It was as much a political and moral statement as it was a scientific and legal one.”

But it also raises philosophical, psychological and moral questions. As a society, and individually, what does it mean to memorialise the dead? How should we do it? For how long should we wait for technology to give more answers? And at what cost to those grieving?

Aronson touches on these, but not deeply enough. At the end, however, he makes a brave point. He notes how the “individualization of victims… has made it more politically palatable for the US… to engage in a seemingly perpetual war”, causing death and injury from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan and Yemen. “One final uncomfortable question we might ask is whether the same kind of unending scientific effort will be taken to identify these victims,” he says. Indeed.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Picking up the pieces”