A French tourist was injured by a polar bear that entered a camp on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic, but her life is not in danger, local authorities announced on Monday.
A French tourist was injured by a polar bear that entered a camp on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic, but her life is not in danger, local authorities announced on Monday. The woman, whose identity has not been specified, was part of an expedition of 25 people who were staying in tents in the middle of nature in this territory twice the size of Belgium, just over a thousand miles away. miles from the North Pole. “From what we know, the woman of French nationality has injuries to one arm,” local police chief Stein Olav Bredli said in a statement.
The tourist was evacuated by helicopter to the hospital in Longyearbyen, the main town of the archipelago. The exact circumstances of the incident, notified to local authorities shortly before 8:30 a.m. (06:30 GMT), have not been specified. “Shots targeted the polar bear which was frightened and left the scene,” Bredli said. The animal has been located and its fate has not yet been decided.
In Svalbard, carrying a rifle is mandatory when leaving urban communities to be prepared in case of a chance encounter with a bear that weighs between 300 and 600 kg for males and half as much for females. According to a 2015 count, the Norwegian sector of the Arctic is home to around 1,000 polar bears, a species that has been protected since 1973. Some 300 of them live year-round on the archipelago and some have resettled in the west of the territory – where the human presence is also concentrated – where they had disappeared when hunting was still permitted. Six fatal attacks on humans have been counted there since 1971. The last involving a 38-year-old Dutchman dates back to 2020.