Norway now has a minimum safe distance of 500m from any polar bears. I think this ended up being somewhat farther.
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Responsible wildlife photogs will agree: even where being close isn’t illegal, safety of both the animal, and with apex predators, the human photographer as well, is a bigger priority than getting a closer shot.
I’ve seen photogs do crazy things running up on bears to get a full-frame shot of the animal. Totally unnecessary, especially now. Some natural boundary around the animal better sets the scene, and modern digital sensors can crop in by half to fill the frame with great sharpness and noise reduction, as long as other technique is good, and keep everyone safe.
Of course It’s Your Shot and Your Mileage May Vary, and you can crop it as seen here if this feels right to you, but consider experimenting with this crop: leave in most of the bear footprints on the right and most though not all of the foreground ice detail, but pull down on the upper left corner that is just white snow, as well as pulling up on the lower right to crop out what is mostly white snow including the dark line in the lower right. I wouldn’t crop to put the head of the bear, looking left, on the left border of the image. I’d leave some space on the left. But this may look better cropped a bit tighter on both the upper left and lower right corners, if it doesn’t make the bear too softly focused. See what you think.
I was concerned that cropping the image down to 1/4 of the original size would make the details too soft. But I think you are correct that the overall image looks better and the bear still looks sharp enough.
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I think the second version is fine. To your original question, I had an engineer friend whose motto was “Close enough is good enough!”. I’m not sure whether polar bears have a white sclera around their pupils, but I’m pretty sure you don’t want to see for yourself!
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