Mary Allen
The tundra is an area that is mostly found in the far north. They exist in the cold-temperate zone. In the north lies the polar region. Summer here lasts only one to three months and it never gets very warm. The winters are correspondingly long and very cold. Soil is always frozen, so it’s permafrost. The amounts of snow are not very large. There are also some Tundra areas in the southern hemisphere and in the Himalayas.
The northern part of the tundra is called the “polar tundra”. The southern part of the tundra is called the “forest tundra”. It borders on the taiga. Trees such as spruce, larch, and birch still grow in the forest tundra, but the trees are not close together. In between grow mosses, lichens, various types of grass, heather, and many other plants.
Some mammals sometimes come from the taiga to the forest-tundra: reindeer, moose, wolves, lynx, brown bears, foxes, hares, and martens, which include otters and some other mammals. Polar bears, musk oxen, arctic foxes, arctic wolves, arctic hares, and arctic hares live in the polar tundra. There are also many birds and insects, but no amphibians and reptiles.
In the tundra, there is still an aborigine population. Some of these people still live as before, others live more modern with vehicles, firearms, and other things. In the tundra of Europe and Asia, a large proportion of them live as nomads, often keeping reindeer. The Eskimos in North America and Greenland live mainly from hunting marine mammals, i.e. whales and others.
Today the tundra is endangered. Some people keep more and more reindeer, which leads to overgrazing, so the plants cannot grow back enough. The second danger lies in the mineral resources that people want to extract, primarily oil and natural gas. A third risk is air pollution. Plants die as a result and the stocks can hardly recover. Finally, due to climate change, the tundra is warming more than other areas. The taiga will therefore expand further north and displace the tundra.