Frost: queen without land or a criminal polar bear?

Posted on 6. October 2022 by Rolf Stange

As if an animal such as a polar bear could be a criminal. But there are those in Longyearbyen who say that Frost is a criminal polar bear.

According to polar bear scientist Jon Aars, “Frost” is a female polar bear, age almost 17 years, captured and marked by the Norwegian Polar Institute for the first time in 2009 in Wijdefjord and known to scientists as N23992. In later years, Frost got cubs a number of times: twins in 2011, 2012 and 2013 – the rapid series indicated that she must have lost her offspring at least the first two times – and again twins in 2015 and 2017 and a single female cub both in 2020 and 2022. Frost is a well-known polar bear for scientists, who have caught and marked her repeatedly.

Polar bear and hut in Adventfjord.
It is not known if this polar bear actually is Frost.

Unfortunately, Frost and her siblings have many times had contact to settlements, huts and humans, sometimes with tragic consequences. In 2014, one of her twins from 2013 died in Billefjord under circumstances not fully revealed but in close temporal connection to a scientific anaesthetization. The other one of these two unfortunate twins was shot after it had been in a camp in Tempelfjord in 2015, where one person received minor injuries. The sad climax was, however, reached when one of Frost’s descendants killed camping place manager Johan Jacobus „Job“ Kootte in his tent on the camping place in Longyearbyen on 28 August, 2020. The polar bear was shot.

Frost got her popular name in the documentary “Queen without land” made by the Norwegian film maker Asgeir Helgestad.

Polar bear family in Billefjord, September 2021.
It is unlikely that this is frost, because she got a single cub in 2020.

Frost appears to spend most of her time in Isfjord, with occasional visits to inner Wijdefjord. She has appeared many times in the vicinity of the settlements, Longyearbyen and Pyramiden, and occasionally probably also within them. And she seems to have got used to breaking into huts and trashing them in search for food, as happened recently to the hut of Greendog, a commercial dogyard in Adventdalen near Longyearbyen. The Sysselmester (government representative/police) usually tries to scare polar bears away with flare guns, helicopters of snow mobiles. If this doesn’t work, anaesthetization and a flight to a remote place within Svalbard are amongst the remaining options. But this has already been done with Frost, only to see her coming back a while later. More robust, but non-lethal deterring methods such as rubber bullets or pepper spray or a “polar bear prison” as in Churchill, where bears are kept for a while with only water and no food to teach them that getting too close to settlements and humans is not a good thing, are apparently not in the arsenal of Norwegian authorities.

Which means that a deadly rifle shot soon comes into consideration. This was now proposed for Frost by Longyearbyen’s mayor, Arild Olsen, who said that Frost has become a danger to the public. But such a decision can not be made by Longyearbyen’s mayor. Only the Sysselmester, currently Lars Fause, has the power to decide on this. Fause, however, said that the law does not permit the preventive shooting of a bear. Instead, it allows this final step only in case of danger to human life; in exceptional cases also to protect major material values.

But Fause said he already made up is mind what to do when a polar bear comes close to, for example, the way to school of Longyearbyen’s children.

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