Suspended death sentence for polar bear in Greenland

08/03/2021 2:21 PM

• Clarín.com

• Dresses

Updated 08/03/2021 2:21 PM

A "troublesome" polar bear

is threatened with death if it approaches a station in northeastern Greenland where it attacked a documentary crew, the Danish army reported Tuesday.

Early Monday,

the animal managed to slip its head

through a poorly closed window in a research facility where the film crew was staying, at a distance of 400 meters from the small military base of Daneborg.

The bear photographed from a distance.

He's just hungry (Facebook).

According to the account of the "Arctic Command", the Danish unit stationed there, the bear

bit one of the three men

on the hand before the team managed to scare him away using their alarm guns.

First transferred to the military base, the wounded documentarian had to be evacuated to Akureyri in Iceland.

The plantigrade, to which

five incidents

have already been attributed

,

returned to the site again hours later and also on the night of Monday to Tuesday, when he managed to break a window of the facility.

The window that the bear broke (Facebook).

"The local authorities have classified it as a 'problem bear', which

authorizes to kill it if it returns,

" the Arctic Command said in a statement.

The incident comes just after northeast Greenland suffered a heat wave, with a record temperature in the region of

23.4ºC.

He's just hungry

Specialists indicate that the retreat of the ice pack, hunting ground for polar bears, forces them to stay on land longer and causes

malnutrition problems

that threaten the species, already classified as vulnerable.

The scientific station (Facebook).

Although they remain rare, incidents with humans increase as bears move closer and closer to inhabited nuclei in search of food, according to environmental protectors and authorities.

According to a study published in Nature Climate Change in July 2020, these iconic Arctic white plantigrades,

currently numbering 25,000

, are threatened with

extinction by around 2,100.

AFP Agency.

GML