Location and climate Location of the tundra climate Tundra environments are found in the northern hemisphere surrounding the Arctic Circle. Places which experience an Arctic tundra climate include parts of: North America , eg northern Canada and Alaska Europe , eg Iceland and northern Scandinavia Asia , eg northern Russia and Siberia Description of the tundra climate Tundra environments are very cold with very little precipitation , which falls mainly as snow.
Musk ox in the Arctic tundra. Tundra comes from the Finnish word tunturia, meaning "treeless plain"; it is the coldest of the biomes. Location Map. The tundra is the coldest of the biomes. It also receives low amounts of precipitation, making the tundra similar to a desert.
Tundra is found in the regions just below the ice caps of the Arctic, extending across North America, to Europe, and Siberia in Asia. Skip to main content Skip to table of contents. This service is more advanced with JavaScript available. Encyclopedia of World Climatology Edition. Editors: John E. Contents Search. Tundra Climate Location and definition. Authors Authors and affiliations Mary Snow. How to cite.
The word Tundra is derived from the Finnish word tunturia for barren land, or treeless plain Tundra, While there are a few areas of Tundra in the Antarctic, as a climatic region the Tundra generally is located around the Arctic Ocean and above the timberline of highlatitude mountains Oliver and Hidore, ; Figure T Open image in new window.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access. Aleksandrova, V. The Arctic and Antarctic: their division into geobotanical areas. New York: Cambridge University Press. Animals that are typically found further south, like the red fox , are moving north onto the tundra.
This means the red fox is now competing with the Arctic fox for food and territory, and the long-term impact on the sensitive Arctic fox is unknown.
Other tundra denizens, such as the wolf spider, are growing bigger and thriving. Shrubs are getting taller , contributing to declines in the sensitive groups of lichen that caribou and other species depend on for food. Lakes and ponds are evaporating or draining away. The Arctic's permafrost, the literal foundation for much of the region's unique ecosystem, is deteriorating with the warmer global climate. Permafrost is a layer of frozen soil and dead plants that extends some 1, feet meters below the surface.
In much of the Arctic, it is frozen year-round. In the southern regions of the Arctic, the surface layer above the permafrost melts during the summer, and this forms bogs and shallow lakes that invite an explosion of animal life.
Insects swarm around the bogs, and millions of migrating birds come to feed on them. With global warming, the fall freeze comes later— in some places recently, not at all —and more of the permafrost is melting in the southern Arctic. Shrubs and spruce that previously couldn't take root on the permafrost now dot the landscape, potentially altering the habitat of the native animals. Another major concern is that the melting of the permafrost is contributing to global warming.
The frozen ground contains about one and a half times the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere today , as well as large amounts of methane , another potent greenhouse gas. Until recently, the tundra acted as a carbon sink and captured huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as part of photosynthesis. That process helped keep the amount of this greenhouse gas from accumulating in the atmosphere.
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