National Geographic’s new $300 million museum lets you relive 138 years of exploration

National Geographic s new 300 million – EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a CNN editorial series committed to reporting on the environmental challenges facing our planet, together with the solutions. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with CNN to drive awareness and education around key sustainability issues and to inspire positive action. At the newest museum in Washington, DC, you can look wildlife in the eye via 1,000 animal portraits, follow in the footsteps of an Everest expedition, and sip a cocktail as projections of whales drift across the wall — all a few blocks from the White House.

The $300 million, 100,000-square-foot National Geographic Museum of Exploration opened June 26, on the site of the former National Geographic Museum, which closed in 2023. Most people know the National Geographic Society through its yellow-bordered magazine, published since 1888. The society was set up that year as a nonprofit and has since supported thousands of “Explorers” — scientists, educators, conservationists and storytellers — “to illuminate and protect the wonder of our world.” Across the galleries, you can step into the Explorers’ shoes.

Beyond a look-but-don’t-touch archive, the museum is a hands-on experience throughout, from immersive theaters to interactive exhibits designed for kids and adults alike. CNN was invited inside for a sneak peek before its opening and spoke with the Explorers behind some of the world’s most ambitious expeditions. Before entering the museum, which is situated next to the society’s headquarters, you’ll see life-sized wildlife statues across the courtyard.

A jaguar stalks a capybara, while a penguin tends its chick, and a nearby vulture reminds you of nature’s vulnerable, often misunderstood cleanup crews. Inside the lobby, the curved wooden walls come alive with videos of glaciers, deep-sea trenches and remote nomadic communities, while a massive circular skylight lets daylight flood in from above. “This museum tells the story of amazing humans who’ve explored, from our founding in 1888 all the way up to people doing work in the field today,” chief campus and experiences officer Emily Dunham told CNN.

Photography has defined National Geographic for more than a century, and the first floor celebrates this legacy. You can scroll a giant digital wall of every magazine cover ever printed, trace how a story gets made from field assignment to publication or try the photographic process yourself in a digital darkroom. The “In Focus” exhibition displays the magazine’s most iconic shots, from the first wildlife photographs taken at night to a keeper’s goodbye to Sudan, the last male northern white rhinoceros, who died in 2018.

Kids get their own adventure — a bookcase that swings open to reveal a hidden passage to the learning zones, including the “Geoverse,” a 270-degree theater transporting visitors into Peruvian cloud forests and Australian deserts. The photographer documenting mass extinction Nearby, an otherwise dark room is lit by the colors of animal portraits. “Photo Ark: Animals of Earth” is a 360-degree gallery showcasing Joel Sartore’s project to photograph every species in human care, with more than 18,000 documented so far.

“After you’ve seen these animals and looked them in the eye,” Dunham said, “how can you not care and want to protect them?” Upstairs, the “Rolex Explorers Landing” puts you in the shoes of a National Geographic Explorer, highlighting their stories and the gear they take into the field. Some of the equipment on display belongs to Rolex Perpetual Planet conservationists and explorers like Steve Boyes, who has spent a decade mapping southern Africa’s Okavango basin. “These are my grandfather’s binoculars,” he told CNN of one exhibit, remembering when he watched “four leopards in one scene” through them.

There is also a mokoro, the narrow dugout canoe with “20,000 miles of exploration in it” that his team steered through the basin. Exploring the ‘Great Spine of Africa’ Interactive maps trace the path of research, from the 2019 expedition that planted the world’s highest weather station near Everest’s summit to the quest to map the Amazon’s waterways from the Andes to the Atlantic. Among the displays is a replica of the JIM suit — the pressurized diving suit worn in the late 1970s by legendary oceanographer and conservationist Sylvia Earle to walk untethered 1,250 feet underwater, a depth record that still stands.

“I’m driven by a sense of urgency, having the privilege of seeing what most people have not been able to see and wanting people to know what’s at risk … and to take action,” Earle told CNN at the museum. When doors close, the museum has a final surprise. “Every night ends in the courtyard, where the building’s facade becomes a canvas,” Dunham said.

Images of fish swim across paving stones, and the building appears to fill with water as virtual penguins drift through and a baby humpback whale swims past its mother. The hope is that the museum will inspire visitors into action. “As a scientist, I can give people a lot of data, and that will reach the mind, but it won’t reach the soul,” said Explorer and penguin biologist Pablo “Popi” Garcia Borboroglu.

“People shouldn’t only come here to watch what we do,” he added. “They need to feel they can be explorers in their own backyard, in their parks. When you explore, you discover, you value the species that live with you — and then you want to protect them.” Michelle Cohan contributed to this report.