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Running a Museum at the End of the World

Welcome to our museum, where our dedicated team is committed to preserving the natural and cultural heritage of one of the planet’s most remote regions. Every austral summer, nestled in a small heritage building at the edge of the Southern Ocean, our small Museum Team works tirelessly to open the doors to visitors. They embody the spirit of adventure, historical and scientific inquiry that defines life in this extraordinary environment.

Sealer’s Trypot. South Georgia Museum

Welcoming visitors

Each year, our small team opens the museum and gift shop for the austral summer, welcoming visitors from across the world. The season runs from October to March each year with over 12,000 visitors. We also run tours of the whaling station and open the doors to the Main Store, a heritage building that allows visitors to look back in time. Proceeds from the gift shop and donations to the museum contribute to the operation of the museum and the South Georgia Heritage Trust’s work. During the winter months the museum and site are closed to visitors.

Caring for a museum collection in a sub-polar climate

South Georgia is a sub-Antarctic Island that lies within the polar front. The Museum sits on the shore of Grytviken where strong winds blow throughout the year. The ensuing cold temperatures, changeable weather and a remote location mean that conservation of the collections at South Georgia Museum is a challenge unlike those faced by most small museums.
Caring for collections is central to the work of any museum. Collections are the most important resource of a museum. They are what make museums unique, and without them, the museum would not exist. Collections care involves creating a suitable environment – especially maintaining temperature and humidity at suitable levels – to display and store collections to the best of our resources. We call this preventative conservation. Caring for collections means putting objects first.
The South Georgia Museum is a heritage building, built in 1914 as the whaling station manager’s villa. It has a wooden framework, modern electrics and plumbing but no heating. What does that mean for a collection housed in a building with no heating and no staff to care for it for six months of the year?

Fluctuating or unsuitable levels of temperature and humidity can encourage the deterioration of historic and vulnerable materials, so it is important for the museum to have a robust monitoring system in place. Other risks are fire, water, pests, theft, vandalism, neglect, chemical deterioration and light. We are lucky in that cold temperatures represent a low risk to most historic materials and actually increase preservation lifespans of objects.
The museum team do not stay in South Georgia over the cold winter, so the monitors are left in place over extended periods thanks to their long battery life and have enabled the museum environment to be recorded over winter for the first time. Even when the museum site is closed to the public and most staff, it is important that preventive conservation work continues. When we began monitoring continuously, early results have already given us a valuable insight into the challenges of maintaining a museum environment in a sub-Antarctic climate. Over the last two years we have recorded summer highs of +14°C inside the museum, while in winter the data loggers captured a chilling winter low of -5°C.

Over the next few years, the museum will continue to gather data to gain a fuller picture of the general museum environment, so that informed decisions can be made to improve the conservation of the museum’s collections. Due to the historical heritage and remote location, heating the building, for example, is not possible and would be unsustainable. However, we anticipate making a number of smaller changes that could have a big impact on preserving the condition of the museum’s collections. Using sealed display cases in the exhibition spaces would add extra protection for objects on display, while extra packing for objects in stores would help ensure they are better insulated against the outside elements.
Watch this space…