95 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.

What name is given to the summer weeks of round-the-clock daylight on the tundra north of the Arctic Circle?

Midnight sun lasts longer the farther north you go: at the North Pole itself, the Sun stays up for about 186 days in a row.

With no trees to perch or nest in on the Arctic tundra, where do snowy owls usually lay their eggs?

On the ground, in a shallow scrape on a windswept rise that stays dry and gives the sitting owl a good view of the land all around.

Which boat did Arctic hunters first build by stretching sealskin over a frame of driftwood or whalebone?

Kayak frames in the eastern Arctic were made of whalebone because no trees grew there, and the design is thought to be at least 4,000 years old.

Which woolly flower of high, rocky slopes in the Alps is a national symbol of both Austria and Switzerland?

Edelweiss wears its wool as sunscreen: the tiny hairs scatter and absorb the strong ultraviolet light that hits plants at high altitude.

DNA tests showed that a strange bear shot in the Canadian Arctic in 2006 was a polar bear crossed with what?

A grizzly was the other parent, proof that the two species breed in the wild, and the press soon coined names for the cross such as pizzly and grolar.

When wolves threaten a muskox herd on the tundra, how do the adults protect their calves?

Form a ring facing outward, or a semicircle: the bulls usually take the front line while the cows and young gather close behind them.

A vault dug into frozen rock on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen stores backup copies of what from the world's crops?

Seeds from the world's gene banks are kept there at −18 °C, and if the power ever failed, the permafrost around the vault would help keep them cold.

Which annual sled dog race crosses Alaskan tundra, spruce forest and sea ice from Anchorage to the town of Nome?

The Iditarod follows a trail that Inupiaq and Athabaskan peoples had travelled for hundreds of years before gold miners crowded onto it.

Which shaggy wild ox lives on treeless Asian uplands between 3,000 and 5,500 m, most commonly on alpine tundra?

Yak herds in the wild favour tundra with a thick carpet of grasses and sedges over the barer steppe country nearby.

Which tundra scavenger, the largest land-dwelling member of the weasel family, has a Latin name meaning glutton?

Wolverine strength is out of proportion to its size: it can kill prey many times larger than itself and tear meat from carcasses that have frozen solid.

The Arctic woolly bear moth, which survives winters as cold as −70 °C, spends up to seven years in which life stage?

As a caterpillar it feeds for only a few weeks each June, so growing up can take seven years, while the cocoon, the adult moth and egg laying all fit into three or four weeks.

Which wading bird flies non-stop from its Alaskan tundra nesting grounds to New Zealand, the longest such flight known?

Bar-tailed godwit flocks shrink their digestive organs before take-off to carry more fat, the fuel for a Pacific crossing that lasts about eight days.

Why was much of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, which carries hot oil, raised on vertical supports instead of being buried?

To keep permafrost frozen: an Arctic expert warned that hot oil in a buried pipe would melt the soil beneath it into mud, so more than 78,000 supports now hold the pipe aloft.

Which fluffy white dog breed takes its name from the reindeer-herding peoples of Siberia's tundra?

Samoyed dogs herded reindeer and pulled sleds, and polar explorers later took them on expeditions to both the Arctic and the Antarctic.

What kind of creature is Belgica antarctica, the largest purely land-dwelling animal native to Antarctica?

A wingless midge only 2 to 6 mm long holds the title, and having no wings may stop the wind from blowing it out to places where it could not survive.

The world's largest national park, home to thousands of muskoxen, covers the icy northeast of which island?

Greenland's far northeast became a park in 1974, and it is now bigger than most of the world's countries yet has no permanent human population.

Which oil field on the tundra of Alaska's North Slope is the largest in North America?

Prudhoe Bay was confirmed as an oil field in 1968 and originally held about 25 billion barrels of oil beneath the coastal plain.

The world's northernmost woody plant, a tundra creeper only about 15 cm high, belongs to which familiar group of trees?

Willows of the Arctic species grow so slowly in the cold that one ankle-high plant was found to be 236 years old.

Which amber tundra berry, used for liqueurs in the Nordic countries, appears on Finland's two-euro coin?

Cloudberry plants are either male or female, so a berry only forms when pollen reaches a female plant, which helps make the fruit scarce.

Which bird of prey of the Arctic tundra is the largest falcon in the world?

Gyrfalcon was so rare and hard to obtain that in European falconry it was reserved for kings and nobles.

Which insect found above the Arctic Circle flies in deep cold by heating its body to about 38 °C under thick hair?

A bumblebee named Bombus polaris manages it, and its queen also builds a heavily insulated nest to save energy while she raises the first brood.

Which relative of salmon and trout lives farther north than any other freshwater fish, as far as Ellesmere Island?

Arctic char is the only fish species in Lake Hazen, a polar lake that stretches to almost 82 degrees north.

Sailors once ate the Kerguelen cabbage, a plant of the subantarctic tundra islands, to ward off which disease?

Scurvy is even in its scientific name: antiscorbutica means 'against scurvy', a nod to the vitamin C in the oil of its leaves.

Which Indigenous people of northern Scandinavia and Finland are best known for semi-nomadic reindeer herding?

The Sámi have the law on their side too: in some regions of the Nordic countries, herding reindeer is legally reserved for them alone.

Which tundra city on Alaska's north coast, known as Barrow until 2016, is the northernmost in the United States?

Utqiaġvik took back its Iñupiaq name after a vote by residents, and each winter the Sun stays below its horizon for about two months.

Trail Ridge Road, the highest continuous paved road in North America, crosses alpine tundra in which US state?

Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park finished the road in 1938, after the head of the Park Service overruled staff who opposed a road across the tundra.

Ekati, opened on the tundra of Canada's Northwest Territories in 1998, was the country's first mine for what?

Diamonds had never been mined in Canada before: two prospectors spent almost ten years following mineral clues across the north to find the deposit.

What term describes the Arctic warming much faster than Earth as a whole, nearly four times as fast since 1979?

Polar amplification feeds on itself: as bright snow and ice melt, the darker land and water left behind reflect less heat back into space.

Which 1922 silent film, the first feature documentary to succeed commercially, follows an Inuk hunter in Arctic Quebec?

Nanook of the North was partly staged: its star normally hunted with a gun, but the director had him use his ancestors' methods for the camera.

Which Canadian author wrote Never Cry Wolf, his 1963 account of watching wolves hunt on the subarctic tundra?

Farley Mowat wrote that the wolves lived largely on rodents and hares rather than big game, and the book became a film in 1983.

Red knots flying north to nest on Arctic tundra stop at Delaware Bay to feast on the eggs of which animals?

Horseshoe crabs spawn just as the birds arrive in spring, handing them a rich, easily digested meal partway through one of the longest migrations of any bird.

Which river flows north through forest and tundra in Canada's Northwest Territories to a delta on the Arctic Ocean?

Mackenzie is the largest river flowing into the Arctic from North America, and with its tributaries it forms the longest river system in Canada.

Which disease broke out among Arctic reindeer in 2016 after a heatwave thawed a carcass frozen for 75 years?

Anthrax spores can lie dormant in frozen soil for decades, and researchers estimate that Arctic permafrost holds over a million infected reindeer carcasses.

Which large rodent has recently begun colonising Arctic tundra as a warming climate lets streamside shrubs spread?

The beaver needs shrubs to build with, and once it arrives its dams hold back streams and create ponds where there were none.

Which large burrowing rodents of the alpine tundra warn each other with loud whistles and hibernate through the winter?

Marmots are the largest true hibernators, since bigger winter sleepers such as bears do not shut their bodies down in the same way.

Lemmings feed on the tundra's mosses and grasses, which places them in what group in the food web?

Primary consumers such as lemmings turn plants into food for the hunters above them, and lemmings do it all year because they do not hibernate.

Which lemming-eating seabirds nest on Arctic tundra, then spend the winter chasing other seabirds to steal their catch?

Jaegers take their North American name from the German word for hunter, and the gulls and terns they rob can be three times their own weight.

On which remote Alaskan island did 29 reindeer released in 1944 multiply to about 6,000 before the herd crashed to 42?

St. Matthew Island became a textbook case of overshoot: the herd outgrew its food supply, and the severe winter of 1963–64 finished it off.

Which abrupt cold period about 12,000 years ago is named after a tundra wildflower whose remains fill its sediments?

Younger Dryas sediments are full of mountain avens, Dryas octopetala, a flower that thrives in glacial conditions and spread where forests had stood.

Which small songbird of the tundra has been recorded farther north than any other perching bird in the world?

Snow bunting flocks carry the cold in their scientific name as well: nivalis is Latin for snow-white.

Which isolated 414-mile Alaskan road, built in 1974 to supply the oil pipeline, ends at Deadhorse near the Arctic Ocean?

Dalton Highway drivers pass only three towns on the whole route, and the TV series Ice Road Truckers followed drivers along it for several seasons.

What Spanish name is given to the alpine tundra of the Andes, found above the forests but below the permanent snow?

Páramo landscapes may be among the fastest-evolving places on Earth, and the largest of them, Sumapaz in Colombia, supplies water to the Bogotá region.

What name is given to the nearly uninhabited tundra of mainland northern Canada, crossed by the Thelon and Back rivers?

The Barren Grounds are short of trees, not water: lakes are abundant, and long rivers such as the Kazan, Dubawnt and Coppermine cross the mostly flat land.

Which Alaskan national park, where trees stop at about 760 m, is mostly tundra below North America's highest mountain?

Denali the park was created in 1917 as Mount McKinley National Park, a name that drew local criticism from the very beginning.

Which matted tundra flower, one of the first to bloom each spring, grows on Kaffeklubben Island at 83°40' north?

Purple saxifrage holds a height record too: a botanist found it at 4,505 m in the Swiss Alps, higher than any other flowering plant in Europe.

The tundra cushion plant moss campion is called the compass plant because its flowers appear first on which side?

South is the side that flowers first, and the cushions hold another surprise: a plant can change the gender of its flowers from one year to the next.

Which tundra sedge has fluffy tufts whose fibres were once used to stuff pillows and make candle wicks?

Cottongrass fluff also works as a blanket: in the Arctic its bristles soak up sunshine and raise the temperature of the plant's reproductive parts.

Canada and Alaska recorded their lowest temperatures ever not on the Arctic tundra but where?

In forests farther south: Snag, in the Yukon, reached −63 °C in 1947, the lowest temperature on record for continental North America.

What is the term for the share of sunlight a surface reflects, a value that drops when snow melts off the tundra?

Albedo comes from the Latin for whiteness: fresh snow scores up to 0.95, while charcoal, one of the darkest substances, manages only about 0.04.

The muskox, a shaggy grazer of the Arctic tundra, takes the first half of its name from what?

Odour of rutting males is the source: the smell is strong and musky, and it serves to attract mates during the breeding season.