Enlarge image
"Freya" has made herself comfortable on a submarine at a naval base.
Photo: Koninklijke Marine
The Arctic is warming faster than any other region on earth.
And for many creatures in the polar region, rising temperatures are becoming a problem because they rely on the ice for their habitat.
Walruses, for example, usually live in the northern polar region.
But now a Dutch scientist has discovered a walrus in North Holland - asleep on a submarine of the so-called walrus class in a naval base.
more on the subject
Satellite image of the week: shrinking glaciers, growing lakes
Meeting of the Antarctic Commission: Climate experts call for the designation of new marine protected areas
Extreme weather in Greenland: The most dangerous rain in the worldAn interview by Christoph Seidler
The animal - a female who was given the name "Freya" - is many hundreds of kilometers too far south, as the British newspaper "The Guardian" reported.
Freya is one of at least two walruses that have recently been spotted far from their arctic habitat.
Another migratory walrus had been seen off the Isles of Scilly, off the coast of France, Spain and Ireland.
In the meantime, "Wally" has returned to Icelandic waters.
With Freya, a walrus has reached the Netherlands for the first time in 23 years in the wild.
Freya probably never came on a broken ice floe
The female walrus is believed to have swum south from its arctic homeland, along the Danish and German coasts.
Assumptions that the walrus fell asleep on a broken ice floe and was carried away by the current have not been confirmed by marine researchers.
Jeroen Hoekendijk, the scientist who first discovered the dozing animal, noticed an open wound on the walrus' front fin, according to the newspaper report.
Apart from that, Freya is in good health.
She has been on and on the submarine for several days.
The walrus caused amusement on social media, also because of the choice of where to sleep.
The arctic mammal is an "excellent example of civil resistance initiated by animals," joked a user according to the Guardian.
In view of the fact that military activities lead to sometimes considerable carbon dioxide emissions, one could assume that "the walrus is probably protesting for climate justice".
vki