LONGYEARBYEN, Svalbard — A 41-year-old software account manager from suburban Illinois was fined 52,000 kroner, roughly $5,000, on Tuesday after Norwegian wildlife inspectors determined he had woken a sleeping polar bear that was, according to all available telemetry, having an absolutely tremendous dream.
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The fine is believed to be the first issued under a Svalbard environmental provision covering “avoidable disturbance of denning, resting, or dreaming wildlife,” a clause inspectors concede has sat unused since 1994 for lack of a sufficiently stupid incident.
The bear, an 1,100-pound male tagged N-114 and known to the research station as Gøran, had been asleep on pack ice about forty meters from a moored expedition vessel. Gøran wears a collar that logs core temperature, heart rate, and limb movement — the same class of sensor data that, in a person, sells a $299 subscription sleep score.
“His paws were going. Both front paws, sustained, for eleven minutes,” said Ingrid Halvorsen, an environmental inspector with the Governor’s office. “Heart rate elevated but stable. Deepest REM episode we have recorded in this population since 2019. Whatever he was doing in there, he was swimming, and it was going well for him.”
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Then, at 6:14 a.m., a man in a neon parka began clapping.
Passengers say the tourist — aboard a $14,000 “see it before it’s gone” climate voyage he had described on the third day as “honestly kind of slow” — wanted footage of a bear that was awake and, ideally, standing. He shouted. He whistled. He held his phone over the rail and played a YouTube clip of a grizzly roaring at full speaker volume for nine seconds.
Gøran lifted his head. Witnesses uniformly describe the expression as personal.
“He looked at us like we’d taken something from him,” one passenger said. “Because we had.”
The tourist told inspectors he assumed the bear was dead, then that he assumed the bear was bored, then that he had a drone he needed to justify. Inspectors noted he was wearing a fitness ring and volunteered, unprompted and twice, that he has not slept properly since 2016 and that his own sleep score that night was a 41.
“So he is aware of what he did,” Halvorsen said. “On some level, he understands the crime.”
The footage was posted anyway. It performed poorly. Commenters were largely focused on the bear, who does not appear at any point to be having fun.
Gøran went back down around 10:30. The collar logged forty minutes of thin, twitchy, surface-level rest — the kind you get on a bus — before he stood up, looked at the water for a while, and walked north without going in.