World's first museum of polar lands opens in France

70,000 visitors per year?

Warming air and ocean water are eroding dam-like seaside formations called ice shelfs that prevent massive inland glaciers from sliding more quickly into the ocean.

The museum, Espace des Mondes Polaires Paul-Emile Victor, provides a visually compelling tutorial on these changes.

"The idea was to open a place that could serve as a support to teaching about the polar world, while approaching it in a playful way," said the museum's director Stephane Niveau.

Jean-Christophe Victor, who died in December at the age of 69, had said he wanted to make visitors "feel the beauty of these polar landscapes and lights, of the disproportion of man in relation to the nature which surrounds him".

The museum highlights objects and documents from the expeditions involving his father, a pioneer of modern ecology who documented the polar wilderness. Paul-Emile Victor died in 1995 at age 87.

The adventurer, who spent much of his childhood in the region where the museum is located, carried out his first missions to Greenland in 1934.

The museum includes a documentation center which is accessible to researchers, a skating rink and a conference hall.

The local authorities which manage the establishment hope to attract 50,000 to 70,000 visitors per year.

Agence France-Presse