In an attempt to stop Norwegian oil company Statoil from drilling for oil and gas in Arctic waters, 15 activists boarded one of the company's offshore drilling rigs on Tuesday.

The rig was about 109 miles away from the Bear Island nature reserve and 186 miles north of Norway. Juha Aromaa, a Greenpeace spokesman, told The Associated Press that the activists were not stopped by any crewmembers.

On Monday, the government overturned a pause in drilling mandated by the Norwegian Environmental Directorate and granted Statoil permission to drill in the Barents Sea's northern area.

"The drilling in question is not in breach with current policy or regulation," Tine Sundtoft, Norway's Minister of Climate and the Environment, told The Wall Street Journal.

Greenpeace members from eight different countries hopped on board the Transocean Spitsbergen rig. It was on its way to the Apollo well in the Barents' Sea Hoops area. Statoil's Hoop area excursion will also include the Atlantis and Mercury wells.

"Statoil wants to gamble with the rich natural assets on Bear Island and the ice edge zone, just to extract more of the oil the climate can't handle that we burn," a Greenpeace member on Esperanza, the environmental group's ship, told WSJ.

According to Norwegian police, they don't have control over the oil rig or Greenpeace's ship because both of them were registered outside of Norway and both of them are in international waters.

"When they still use this form of protest, we believe they act irresponsibly and illegally," Statoil said in a statement.

The company insists that it knows what it's doing, despite the risk of an Arctic oil spill.

"We recognize that the further north we go, the greater the challenges become," said Dan Tuppen, the company's director for Barents Sea operations. "Since we are planning to drill in the summer, the area in question will be ice-free. So the ice is not really the challenge."

AP reported that 30 Greenpeace activists also boarded a rig scheduled to drill in the Pechora Sea contracted by Gazprom of Russia. The activists were kicked off the rig, located in Ijmuiden (a Dutch Port) after five hours, however.
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