The exhibition will be taken down on 29 February for the installation of the next exhibition: Beyond fast fashion.
Before, whales swam in Bærum and flounder was found in Økern (near the museum). This exhibition show the Oslo area as it looked 11,000 years ago until today.
The exhibition has been created in connection with the fact that it is 200 years since the Danish-Norwegian geologist, Jens Esmark (1762 – 1839), made the ground-breaking natural history discovery: there have been ice ages in Norway and Europe.
The discovery is referred to as one of the most important Norwegian scientific discoveries ever. Read the discoverer's own descriptions in the original publication from 1823, and see the evidence in the form of sea animals that we have retrieved from the museum's collections.
You will also be presented with examples of ongoing research on the Ice Age in Norway. 200 years ago, the Norwegian geologist Esmark noticed ridges of gravel right out on the coast which he thought resembled moraines formed by glaciers. He also found signs that valleys and fjords have been dug out of the ice. Esmark was then the first to suggest that huge ice masses had once covered large areas of land.
Jens Esmark (1762-1839)
- A Norwegian geologist and Norway's first professor of rock science.
- Esmark claimed he had evidence that Norway and Northern Europe were once covered by an enormous ice sheet in the past. The article with the evidence, "Bidrag til vor Jordklodes Historie", was published in Magazin for Naturvidenskaberne (1824) and in The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal (1826).