MS Polstjerna
ship built in 1949
MS Polstjerna is Norway's best-preserved sealing ship. The Polstjerna is owned by the Tromsø University Museum, and since 2004 it been exhibited in a dry dock in a conservation building near Polaria in Tromsø.
History
The vessel was built at Moen's shipyard near Risør in the spring of 1949 and launched the same spring. The ship had 33 fishing seasons and harvested close to 100,000 seals from the West Ice and East Ice, before its final season in 1981. It was then purchased by the Arctic Society (Arktisk Forening) and later transferred to the University Museum.
Dimensions
It is 28.3 metres (92 ft 10 in) long, 7 metres (23 ft 0 in) wide and has a tonnage of 129 gross tons and a draft of 2.5 metres (8 ft 2 in) forward and 4 metres (13 ft 1 in) aft. The masthead is 19 metres (62 ft) from the waterline.
Conservation
The building that houses the drydocked ship was designed by the Per Knudsen architectural firm, which won an architectural competition for the facility. The building also features temporary and permanent exhibits.
The public source identifies “MS Polstjerna” as ship built in 1949. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Polstjerna, ship and built.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19380732. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004, 1949 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “MS Polstjerna” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.