An unnamed person has been fined 50,000 kroner (about £3,890) after using a vessel's foghorn to wake a sleeping polar bear in a fjord in northwestern Svalbard, Norway, according to governor Lars Fause. The bear had been spotted sleeping on land as the boat passed by before someone sounded the horn, waking it and causing it to relocate.
Svalbard's regulations forbid needlessly disturbing, attracting or pursuing polar bears, which have been a protected species there since 1972; roughly 250 were counted in the archipelago's last scientific survey in 2015. It is not the first such fine: a tourist was fined 11,500 kroner in 2024 for approaching a walrus too closely.
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