The best single afternoon in Longyearbyen. The Svalbard Museum covers the full sweep of the archipelago's human presence: the Dutch and English whalers who turned Spitsbergen into an industrial slaughterhouse in the seventeenth century, the Russian and Norwegian trappers who wintered alone in remote huts, and the coal miners who built the towns that survive today. Natural history occupies an equally serious section — polar bears, walrus, Arctic fox, and the peculiar ecology of an archipelago where the continental shelf breaks quickly into the deep Arctic Ocean.
The museum is next to UNIS, the university centre, on the edge of town. Give it two hours.