A person in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic has been fined 50,000 kroner ($5,255) for 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 kilometres (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 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.

It is not the first time people have been fined for disrupting animals in the Svalbard region. In 2024, a tourist was fined 11,500 kroner (£900) for getting too close to a walrus.

The Svalbard Environment Act stipulates that all traffic on the archipelago must take place in a way that does not lead to unnecessary disturbance of local wildlife - which include polar bears, seals, whales, reindeer and arctic foxes.