Svalbard sits about 620 miles from the North Pole and is one of the few places left on Earth where polar bears roam freely. Thousands of tourists visit every year to see them in their natural habitat, and the Golden Rule is—look, snap some pics, and move on. Not everyone gets that.
Earlier this month, an unidentified boat operator sailing through a fjord in northeastern Svalbard spotted a bear resting on land and responded by blasting the ship’s foghorn. The bear woke up and moved. The governor of the territory’s office issued a fine of $5,255 under Section 30a of the Svalbard Environmental Act, which prohibits needlessly disturbing, attracting, or pursuing a polar bear. The operator agreed to pay.
This wasn’t the first time this has happened. In June 2024, two guides with a French shipping company were each fined around $2,100 after steering paying guests in rubber boats toward a polar bear and cub feeding on a whale carcass in northern Svalbard. That incident was at least somewhat understandable, however dumb and misguided. Someone wanting a closer look is a human impulse. Blasting a foghorn at a sleeping bear is just being an a**hole.
Norway Fined a Boat Operator for Disturbing a Sleeping Polar Bear in Svalbard
The rules have gotten stricter because tourism has boomed. Svalbard saw 506 cruise ships carrying 67,000 passengers in 2024 alone, a number that has doubled in under 15 years. Protections that took effect in January 2025 now require vessels to stay at least 300 meters from bears in summer and 500 meters through June. Fines are just the starting point for violations. In serious cases, the penalty goes up to five years in prison.
The bears are doing better than the headlines around them suggest. Jon Aars, a senior scientist with the Norwegian Polar Institute, led a team that tracked the weight and size of nearly 800 bears in Svalbard between 1992 and 2019 and found them healthy and reproducing despite major sea ice loss. “I was quite surprised,” Aars told CBS News, “because we have lost so much sea ice since I started.” His data suggests the bears have adapted, hunting more efficiently as shrinking ice concentrates their prey. “Some of us would predict that they should be in trouble already,” he said.
They’ve outlasted unregulated hunting and a warming Arctic. A foghorn is a minor problem by comparison, but it’s still a d*ck move.
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