What is the tundra? Translated from Finnish, tunturi means "barren land", "land of the enemy" or "treeless plain". In a word, a place unsuitable for life. Most people's ideas about it come down to information obtained from the school curriculum - mosses, deer, permafrost, lichens - and all this is somewhere far in the north. Information gleaned from popular TV programs speaks of threats (primarily to buildings) that are associated with global warming.
Endless Snow Desert
Tundra can be described as a cold desert, located around the north pole. Someone calls it the southern border of the Arctic, someone - the territory located immediately beyond the taiga. Each of these statements correctly explains what the tundra is.
On the territory of Russia, it stretches from the Bering Strait in the eastern part to Finland in the western part in a strip from 300 km to 500 km. Including the arctic and subarctic zones, the tundra occupies about 10% of the landexpanses of our country. The entire coast of the Arctic Ocean is covered by this strip, which is narrower in the European part of Russia and wider in Siberia; the northern part of Kamchatka is also captured.
The most severe time
What is the tundra in winter? At this time, the climate becomes even more severe - frosts reach -51 degrees in the Siberian part. They are exacerbated by the winds, which are expanse due to the lack of mountains and more or less decent hills. Intermittent plains and lowlands on the geographical map are marked in green, which completely covers the territory of the tundra. The sun does not rise at all, the polar night lasts for a long 8-9 months. This is the most difficult time for the animal world of the region.
Everyone is hiding from the "black blizzard": people, rare animals and birds. After storms raging for weeks, what remains is a pitted snowy desert, reminiscent of sandy in appearance, since the cover is quite small and is in a mobile state, which led one tundra explorer to call it "the land of snow dunes."
Time for mosquitoes and nesting birds
The cold northern summer comes with a maximum temperature not exceeding +10 degrees, but the sun does not hide at all - white nights begin, which last 64 days. The upper layer of the snow cover thaws, forming endless overflows of small, no deeper than 50-100 cm, lakes, which the locals fearlessly cross on bunk beds. It thaws and revives everything around.
Tundra soil is very specific - above the layer of eternalpermafrost there are small gley and humus horizons. The specificity is explained by the fact that the waters here are stagnant, evaporation is small, low temperatures do not allow plant residues to rot and decompose. There is little precipitation, only up to 250 mm per year, but the thawed water on the soil surface does not have time to evaporate. All this contributes to the formation of swamps, which are endless here.
Grace happens here too
What is the tundra in summer? The whole nature of this region is due to the length of this period - the plants must have time to bloom in order to produce seeds. This is the world of reindeer moss, sedges and lichens, there are wild rosemary and heather, dwarf birches and shaggy willows. The trees are short because the roots cannot go into the soil.
In autumn, huge blue-gray fields of blueberries are interspersed with orange cloudberry plantations, a lot of crowberries, in a word, a berry paradise - that's what the tundra is. The definition of this region as a kingdom of mosquitoes is also correct, because the air in the tundra is not transparent due to the number of these insects. Clouds of various midges and northern bumblebees complete the picture. Endless mushrooms. This is all food for the birds. The tundra is a nesting place for them.
Millions of birds spend here a short summer. There are so many of them that, according to eyewitnesses, the lakes become either snow-white from swans, or dark from geese. The peregrine falcon, ptarmigan and snow bunting, gulls, guillemots and terns nest here. They feed not only on mosquitoes. The northern seas, lakes and swamps of the tundra are full of fish (beluga, salmon) and shellfish. Fromfamilies of rodents the tundra is inhabited by lemmings.
If you capture these gray and orange fields of berries, dark white from the birds of the lake, to show what the tundra is, the photo will be very effective. The animal world of this area is not poor at all. Reindeer and white fox, symbols of the north, are found here in unlimited numbers. The coast is the realm of polar bears and other large animals such as the walrus.
The climate, and with it the nature, change from north to south, and the tundra is conditionally divided into three subzones: arctic, lichen-moss and south-shrub. Even by the names you can see how the plant world changes as you move away from the North Pole.
Natural continuation of the tundra
Then begins the territory, very slightly different from the one described above. What is tundra and forest tundra? How are they different? Some experts do not find much difference and call the second subzone the first. Indeed, there are few differences. The forest tundra belongs to the subarctic zone, stretches, completely repeating the southern border of the tundra, its width varies from 30 to 300 km. The average annual temperature here is only 8-10 degrees higher, the trees are low, found in rare islands. But since the forest-tundra comes close to coniferous forests, and its southern regions are also more or less covered with them, it is often called the subzone not of the tundra, but of the taiga.
