45 Fun Facts About Tundra

What prevents trees from growing in a tundra?

Cold and a very short summer: tree seedlings barely survive near the tree line, so even a run of warmer summers can shift where the trees stop.

From which language does the word 'tundra' come?

Russian: English took the word from Russian, which may have borrowed it from a Sámi word said to mean an elevated wasteland or a marshy plain.

What are inuksuit, which Inuit build across the treeless Arctic tundra?

Stone landmarks: they mark routes, hunting grounds and food caches, and the human-shaped stone figure often called an inuksuk is really an inunnguaq.

Which tundra animal can let its body temperature fall below freezing while it hibernates?

Arctic ground squirrel: males also stash food in their burrows in late summer, so they have something to eat when they wake in spring.

'Reindeer moss', a staple winter food of tundra herds, is actually what kind of organism?

A lichen: it is really a fungus living in partnership with algae, so despite its name it isn't a moss or even a plant.

Which forest belt borders the Arctic tundra to the south?

The taiga: many wild reindeer herds leave the open tundra to spend the winter among its trees.

What grows in permafrost cracks each winter to build the tundra's large polygon networks?

Ice wedges form when intense cold cracks the ground and spring meltwater refreezes in the crack; year after year the wedges join into polygon patterns.

Why is desert-dry Arctic tundra boggy in summer?

Frozen ground stops drainage: meltwater can't soak down past the permafrost, and evaporation is too low to dry it out, so marshes and ponds form.

Which Ice Age giants have been found preserved in Siberian permafrost?

Woolly mammoths: soft tissue from those carcasses shows scientists what the animals looked like, and DNA from their hair helped map the mammoth genome.

Which cold-blooded animals are few or absent in the tundra?

Frogs and lizards are few or absent because it's too cold for them, yet insects such as mosquitoes do live there.

Which bird migrates between its Arctic nesting grounds and the Antarctic every year?

Arctic tern: by chasing the sun from one end of the world to the other, it lives through two summers every year.

Which largely tundra region of Siberia has produced most of the country's natural gas?

Yamalo-Nenets: part of its gas is chilled into liquid and shipped out by tankers built to break through Arctic ice.

In Köppen's system, tundra is one of two polar climates; what's the other?

Ice cap: no month there averages above freezing, which is why most of Antarctica and Greenland lie buried under ice sheets.

Which Canadian territory, mostly tundra, was carved out of the Northwest Territories in 1999?

Nunavut: Inuit, who make up most of its people, won the new territory through a land-claims agreement with the federal government.

Why does the Antarctic tundra lack large land mammals, unlike the Arctic?

Isolation from the other continents, with Antarctica cut off by the Southern Ocean for tens of millions of years, kept land mammals from reaching it; seals and penguins use only the shore.

What is the name for the stunted, wind-twisted forest found at the edge of alpine tundra?

Krummholz, German for 'crooked wood', grows low and twisted because freezing winds kill the shoots that poke above the shelter of rocks or snow.

At its upper edge, alpine tundra ends at which boundary?

The snow line: above it more snow falls each year than can melt, so snow can pile up and slowly turn into glacier ice.

Ground must stay frozen for at least how long in a row to count as permafrost?

Two years: despite the name, permafrost needn't be ancient, though much of it has stayed frozen for many thousands of years.

Which small alpine-tundra mammal dries plants in the sun and stores them to eat in winter?

The pika: it doesn't hibernate, so it lives through the winter on the 'hay' it gathered and dried in summer.

What is the name for the seasonally thawing ground above permafrost in which plant roots can grow?

Active layer is the name for the top of the ground that thaws each summer and refreezes in winter; only there can plant roots take hold above the permafrost.

Which two large cities are the only ones in the world built on continuous permafrost?

Norilsk and Yakutsk: heated buildings there stand on piles with air space beneath, so their warmth doesn't thaw the permafrost.

What are the large ice-cored mounds, up to 70 m high, that form in permafrost regions called?

Pingos grow as groundwater under pressure freezes into an expanding ice core, and scientists borrowed their name from an Inuit word.

Which two greenhouse gases does decomposing biomass release as permafrost thaws?

Carbon dioxide and methane escape as the thawed remains rot, and the extra warming they cause thaws still more permafrost in a feedback loop.

Despite its name, the muskox is most closely related to which animals?

Sheep and goats: when wolves threaten, muskoxen line up or form a circle with their horns facing out and the calves kept in the middle.

What does the muskox's Inuktitut name, umingmak, mean?

The bearded one is the meaning of umingmak, a reference to the muskox's long, shaggy guard hairs; the English name refers instead to the strong odour of rutting males.

Muskoxen introduced to which European country wandered over the border to found a small herd in Sweden?

Norway received muskoxen from Greenland in the Dovrefjell mountains; in 1971 a few wandered across the border into Sweden's Härjedalen and founded a small herd there.

What does an Arctic fox's bushy tail do in the cold?

Keeps it warm: a sleeping fox curls up behind its brush, and when prey runs short in winter it trails polar bears to eat their leftovers.

The blue colour morph of the Arctic fox is most common in which country?

Iceland is where the blue morph dominates, making up the majority of the island's Arctic foxes, whereas the white morph prevails almost everywhere else.

Reindeer are unique among deer for what reason?

Females may grow antlers, and pregnant cows keep theirs until they give birth in spring, months after the biggest bulls have shed their own.

What is the wild Rangifer tarandus called in North American English?

Caribou came into English through French from an Algonquian word, probably Mi'kmaq, describing how the animal paws through snow to feed.

Why do many pregnant reindeer head for remote islands, shorelines or open tundra to give birth?

To avoid predators: some barren-ground herds even trek hundreds of kilometres to calving grounds with poorer forage and lingering snow.

Which is the smallest subspecies of reindeer?

Svalbard reindeer are the smallest subspecies: short-legged, stocky and isolated on their high-Arctic archipelago, whereas Osborn's, of British Columbia, is the largest.

Lemmings belong to the same rodent subfamily as which familiar animals?

Voles: that subfamily also includes muskrats, and lemmings are the main food of many Arctic carnivores, from foxes to weasels.

Which 1958 Disney film faked footage of lemmings leaping off a cliff, cementing the mass-suicide myth?

White Wilderness staged it: filming in landlocked Alberta, the crew ran lemmings on a snowy turntable and herded them off a cliff, yet the film won an Oscar.

What is unusual about the snowy owl's daily habits compared with most owls?

It is often active by day, especially in summer, and in years when lemmings are plentiful it breeds so well that snowy owls irrupt far to the south.

DNA put the snowy owl in the same genus as which owl?

Great horned owl: DNA shows the snowy owl is its close relative, so it is often placed in Bubo instead of its old genus, Nyctea.

Which Ice Age land bridge, now mostly under the sea, joined the tundra of Siberia and Alaska?

Beringia: water locked up in Ice Age ice sheets lowered the sea and exposed it, and meltwater drowned it again as the ice retreated.

About how fast can an Arctic hare bound across the tundra?

60 km/h: and to keep warm, Arctic hares dig shelters in the snow to rest and sleep in.

The ptarmigan's genus name, Lagopus, refers to which feature of the bird?

Its feathered feet and toes: Lagopus comes from ancient words meaning 'hare' and 'foot', because the bird's feathered feet recall a hare's furry paws.

The word 'ptarmigan', with its silent p, comes from which language?

Gaelic: the word comes from tarmachan, and the p is thought to have been added through a mistaken belief that it came from Greek, perhaps from pteron, 'wing'.

What is the pale colour of the ptarmigan's winter plumage useful for?

Blending into snow: and in the high Arctic, many rock ptarmigan fly long distances south to spend the winter.

About how much tundra did the 2007 Anaktuvuk River fire burn on Alaska's North Slope?

1,000 km²: built-up dead plants and peat fuel such fires, and burning them released carbon the tundra's soil had been storing.

Which Manitoba town on Hudson Bay is known as the 'Polar Bear Capital of the World'?

Churchill: when Hudson Bay's sea ice melts each summer the bears are forced ashore, and they gather near town in autumn waiting for it to refreeze.

Roughly how many kinds of plants grow in the Arctic and subarctic tundra?

1,700: nearly all of them grow low to the ground, where the air is milder, and winter snow covers and shelters them.

Which penguin breeds almost only on Australia's subantarctic Macquarie Island?

Royal penguin: after moulting each autumn the birds leave the island for about six months at sea, and where they spend that time is still largely unknown.