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A person sailing through Norway's Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic has been ordered to pay 50,000 kroner ($5,255) after using a foghorn to wake a sleeping polar bear, local officials said Thursday.
The incident took place earlier this month when a vessel was sailing in a fjord in northeastern Svalbard, around 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the North Pole.
"Its occupants are said to have spotted a polar bear sleeping on land," the governor of the territory said in a statement. "A person on board then used the ship's foghorn, waking the animal, which moved to another location," he added.
Neither the identity nor the nationality of the person has been disclosed. The governor's office ordered the individual to pay the hefty fine, which the person agreed to do.
Under local regulations, "it is forbidden to needlessly disturb, attract or pursue a polar bear," which was declared a protected species in Svalbard in 1972. Some 260 polar bears were counted in the archipelago during the last scientific estimate, carried out in 2015.
The polar bears found around Svalbard belong to the Barents Sea subpopulation, which is shared between Norway and Russia and includes bears roaming the Franz Josef Land archipelago to the east.
A joint Norwegian-Russian survey estimated the subpopulation at around 2,650 bears, of which roughly 1,000 live in Norwegian territory. Polar bears in Norway have been fully protected from hunting since 1973, when the country signed the international Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears, ending a century of hunting that had significantly reduced their numbers.
While polar bears globally are classified as a vulnerable species due to climate change and the loss of sea ice, research on the Svalbard population has found that the bears there have largely maintained stable body condition in recent decades, a trend scientists attribute in part to increased access to alternative prey such as reindeer and walrus.
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