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On Sunday, March 24, 2013, a determined polar bear made a fatal error in the prey selection process. The six-year-old healthy male would not be deterred from getting at two humans in a cabin located on Svalbard (administered by Norway) at Hornsund on the island of Spitsbergen. Hornsund is the most southern fjord on the southern tip of the Island of Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago, about 140 km south of Longyearbyen.The incident was reported in newsinenglish.no in 2013. The incident is confirmed in the PBHIMS database obtained by AmmoLand, which includes many reports of polar bear attacks that happened...

Polar bears are very large, dangerous adversaries. Surviving for six years after a shipwreck in the Arctic, four Russian hunters killed ten of them with two homemade spears. The story is told in the modern book Four Against the Arctic by David Roberts, published in 2003. Roberts spent two weeks at the location most likely to have been where the Russian sailors/hunters had survived, on Halfmoon Island, across a narrow channel from Edgeøya. In those two weeks, his party of four saw nine polar bears, three of which had to be chased away with flare guns, and two of the...

A bit after noon on February 27 at Vestpynten in the Svalbard Archipelago (administered by Norway), far north of the arctic circle, a polar bear was shot during a conflict with people and dogs. Vestpynten is a small village in the Archipelago roughly 90 miles North and a bit West of Longyerbyen.The incident report was uncovered with a Freedom of information Act (FOIA) request by AmmoLand. Individual names have been redacted. The report was translated into English, so it has been edited for readability, and fictitious names have been substituted. From the FOIA account, incident 162:The bear was observed around...

Russia said on Wednesday that restrictions imposed by Norway were blocking the transport of goods to Russian-populated settlements on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and called on Oslo to resolve the issue as soon as possible or face consequences. The ministry said that it summoned Norway's Chargé d'Affaires to protest the restrictions, which it said were blocking the transport of food and medical equipment. Svalbard is part of Norway, although Russia has the right to exploit the archipelago's natural resources under a treaty signed in 1920 and maintains a diplomatic presence in the largely Russian- and Ukrainian-populated settlement of Barentsburg.

Operator of what is the world’s northernmost fiber optic subsea cable, Space Norway, has located the disruption to somewhere between 130 to 230 kilometers from Longyearbyen in the area where the seabed goes from 300 meters down to 2700 meters in the Greenland Sea. The error happened on Friday morning, January 7. Svalbard Undersea Cable System is a twin submarine fiber optic communication cable connecting Longyearbyen with Andøya north of Harstad in northern Norway. The two cables are 1,375 and 1,339 km respectively, and Space Norway informs in a press release that there is good connection in the cable still...

Heavy snowfall continued Thursday in parts of Austria and southern Germany, with several places cut off and the bad weather expected to persist. Snow was causing problems in other parts of Europe, even in Norway’s Arctic Svalbard archipelago. Austrian police said that a 16-year-old boy from Australia was killed in an avalanche in St. Anton am Arlberg as he was skiing with his family on Wednesday. In neighboring Slovakia, the mountain rescue service said a 37-year-old Slovak man was killed by an avalanche in the Mala Fatra mountains. That brought to at least 16 the number of weather-related deaths reported...

Norwegian authorities on Monday defended the actions of guards from a German cruise ship that killed a polar bear that had attacked and injured a crew member, saying they at first tried to scare it away. Police spokesman Ole Jakob Malmo said two members of the 12-man crew that set foot on the most northern island of the Svalbard archipelago ahead of tourists on Saturday first tried to ward off the bear "by shouting and making loud noises as well as firing a signal pistol, but to no effect." A 42-year-old German man who was not identified sustained minor head...

CNN) -- Idiotic TV shows and all the latest apps bumming you out on the 21st century? Ready for some "me time" on the world's remotest islands? Forget golden sands and swaying palms -- the reality of solitude is different as these terrifyingly distant landfalls demonstrate. ... Bear Island 400 miles off Europe's north coast Bjornoya, better known as Bear Island, is the southernmost island in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, 400 miles north of mainland Europe -- but only on paper, given that it's almost 150 miles south of the Norwegian island chain with which it's lumped. It's been...

Explanation: During a total solar eclipse, the Sun's extensive outer atmosphere, or corona, is an inspirational sight. Streamers and shimmering features that engage the eye span a brightness range of over 10,000 to 1, making them notoriously difficult to capture in a single photograph. But this composite of 29 telescopic images covers a wide range of exposure times to reveal the crown of the Sun in all its glory. The aligned and stacked digital frames were recorded in the cold, clear skies above the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Norway during the Sun's total eclipse on March 20 and also show...

Research by the University of Birmingham has provided evidence that a warm atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide was present in an ancient ice age. This could only have happened if the planet was nearly all covered in ice and snow. Scientists from the University’s School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, say that, whereas today, we associate more greenhouse gases with a warm world, in a very severe ice age, even plenty of greenhouse gas cannot stop the world being covered in reflective ice and snow. This type of glaciation could occur again in the future if the Earth’s atmosphere...

A giant fossil sea monster found in the Arctic had a bite that would have been able to crush a 4x4 car, according to its discoverers. Researchers say the marine reptile, which measured an impressive 15m (50ft) long, had a bite force of about 45 tonnes (33,000lbs) per square inch. The creature's partial skull was dug up last summer in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard by a Norwegian-led team. Dubbed "Predator X", it patrolled the oceans some 147 million years ago. Its jaws may have been more powerful than those of a Tyrannosaurus rex, though estimates of the dinosaur's bite...

UN chief Ban Ki-moon visited Wednesday a vault carved into the Arctic permafrost, filled with samples of the world's most important seeds in case food crops are wiped out by a catastrophe. "The world faces many daunting challenges today, one of the greatest of which is how to feed a growing population in the context of climate change," a bundled-up Ban told reporters after he toured the site in the Svalbard archipelago some 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) from the North Pole. "The seeds stored here in Svalbard will help us do just that. Sustainable food production may not begin in...

Windsurfers appeal to crown princeSome avid windsurfers, sure they have a kindred spirit in Norway's crown prince, hope he can help them overturn a ban on the sport in some protected areas off the Norwegian coast. They claim Crown Prince Haakon himself has violated the ban."I've surfed with (Crown Prince Haakon) several times, and I know that he loves the waves," surfer Thomas Olsen told newspaper Østlandsposten."Norwegians are outdoorsy people, but (here) we're not allowed to use the outdoors," Olsen claimed. "I hope the crown prince will meet me to talk about this."Another avid windsurfer, Markus Allen, says the surfers...

Dr. Batman to the rescueNorwegian naming laws relaxed a bit on January 1, 2003 but it is still a rarity when someone adopts Batman as their legal name.Medical student Anders Mjelle, 22, is studying to become a pediatrician, and prefers Batman to more supernaturally powerful heroes like Spiderman or Superman, newspaper Nordlys reports.Mjelle, now Anders Batman Mjelle, told the paper that the idea came to him while he was practicing his signature during a prescription class."It just wasn't as cool as doctor signatures usually are. So I tried signing with the name to my old hero of heroes, Batman. That...

Terror alarm to be tested in OsloA noiseless terror alarm will be tested in an Oslo subway station. The surveillance system will be able to detect chemical agents and radioactive radiation released by terrorists.Alarm systems such as this in crowded areas is one of several measures considered by the authorities, says director Finn Moerch Andersen of the Directorate for National Security to NRK.He adds that such an alarm will function only in addition to other measures.The Al Qaida has twice over the past few years encouraged followers to attack Norwegian interests. Last year the Security Service of the Norwegian police...

Insane must payNorway's Supreme Court has ruled that even those judged as insane when committing a crime must be held financially accountable for their acts, reversing common legal practice.Up until now insanity has acted as a protection against compensation claims for non-economic damages to victims of violence or their survivors, newspaper VG reports.On Tuesday the Supreme Court overturned an appeals court decision and ordered a 36-year-old to pay NOK 50,000 (USD 7,600) in compensation despite being assessed as insane at the time of the crime."A dramatic change. The Supreme Court is now saying that consideration of the victim is more...

Melting glacier 'false alarm' By Julian Isherwood, Scandinavia Correspondent (Filed: 17/08/2002) Pictures released by Greenpeace claiming to show how man-made global warming has caused Arctic glaciers to retreat are at best misleading and only illustrate a natural phenomenon, says a leading glaciologist.   A greenpeace activist compares the photo above with the Norwegian glacier at present The picture series, which compared the size of a glacier on Svalbard in 1918 with its size in 2002, was published across the world alongside a Greenpeace warning that global warming caused by man-made greenhouse gases was causing Arctic glaciers to melt."The blame can...