On 19 July, the Russian nuclear icebreaker 50 Let Pobedy returned back to Murmansk from another tourist cruise to the North Pole via Franz Josef Land, part of the Russian Arctic National Park.

On 13 July, when tourists disembarked onto an ice floe to mark their arrival at the planet’s northernmost point, someone on the bridge sighted an approaching polar bear. The decision was then taken to advise everyone promptly back to the vessel so that people could watch the animal from a safe distance.

The young polar bear (putatively a female) walked around the landing site, licked the signal flags, and calmly withdrew to the ice desert. The animal appeared to be quite normal. In all evidence, she had just crossed an open stretch of water.

This encounter is an extremely rare phenomenon providing scientists with important tips on the seasonal migration of polar bears. They are believed to penetrate extensive fields of old ice with high compaction ratio only on rare occasions. But with each passing year, their tracks are found ever closer to the pole, and now the long-awaited encounter has at last taken place. The only other encounter with a polar bear (also a female) in the same area occurred on 1 August 2007.