The world of the Snow Queen - that's what the tundra is

What is tundra? In Finnish, tunturi means "barren land", "land of the enemy" or "treeless plain" In a word, a place unsuitable for life. Representations about it in most people are reduced to the information received from the school program - mosses, deer, permafrost, lichens - and all this is somewhere there, far to the north. Information derived from popular TV programs, speaks of threats (primarily buildings) that are associated with global warming.

Endless snow desert

The Tundra can be described as a cold desert located around the north pole. Someone calls it the southern boundary of the Arctic, someone - the territory immediately behind the taiga. Each of these statements correctly explains what tundra is.

On the territory of Russia, it stretches from 300 km to 500 km from the Bering Strait in the eastern part to Finland in the western. Including the arctic and subarctic zones, the tundra occupies about 10% of the land areas of our country. The entire coast of the Arctic Ocean is covered by this band, which is narrower in the European part of Russia and broad in Siberia; The northern part of Kamchatka is also captured.

The harshest 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 aggravated by winds, which here because of the lack of mountains and more or less decent hills expanse. 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 long 8-9 months. This is the most difficult time for the wildlife of the region.

Everyone is hiding from the "black blizzard": people, rare animals and birds. After the storms raging for weeks, there remains an icy snowy desert, reminiscent of a sandy one, since the cover is quite small and is in a mobile state, which allowed one tundra researcher to call it "the country of snow dunes".

Time of mosquitoes and nesting birds

There comes a cold northern summer with a maximum temperature not exceeding +10 degrees, but the sun does not hide at all - there are white nights that last 64 days. The upper layer of the snow cover thaws, forming endless spills of small, not deeper than 50-100 cm, lakes that locals fearlessly cross on the bunks. Thaws and comes to life all around.

The soil of the tundra is very specific - there are small gley and humus horizons above the layer of permafrost. Specificity is explained by the fact that the water here is standing, evaporation is small, low temperatures do not allow plant residues to rot and decompose. Precipitation falls a little, up to 250 mm per year, but thawed water on the surface of the soil does not have time to evaporate. All this contributes to the formation of swamps, of which there are an infinite number.

And here there is grace

What is the tundra in the summer? The whole nature of this region is determined by the length of this period - the plants must have time to fade to give seeds. This is the world of yagel, sedge and lichen, there are wild rosemary and heather, dwarf birches and shaggy willows. Trees are not high, because the roots can not escape into the soil.

In autumn, huge blue fields of blueberries alternate with orange plantations of cloudberries, a lot of crowmen, in short, a berry paradise - that's what the tundra is. The definition of this region as a mosquito kingdom is also true, because of the amount of these insects the air in the tundra is not transparent. Clouds of different midges and northern bumblebees complete the picture. Infinite set of mushrooms. This is all food for birds. The tundra is the place of nesting for them.

Millions of birds spend a short summer here. There are so many of them that, according to eyewitnesses, the lakes are now snow-white from swans, then dark from geese. Here, the Peregrine Falcon, the Ptarmigan and the Snowball, the seagulls, the guillemots and terns nest. They are fed not only by mosquitoes. The northern seas, lakes and marshes of the tundra are full of fish (beluga, salmon) and mollusks. From the family of rodents, the tundra is inhabited by lemmings.

If you capture these blue and orange berries, dark white from the birds of the lake, to show what the tundra is, the photo will be very spectacular. The animal world of this locality is not at all poor. The reindeer and the white arctic fox, the symbols of the north, are found here in unlimited quantities. The coast is the realm of polar bears and other large animals such as walrus.

The climate, and with it nature, varies from north to south, and the tundra is conventionally divided into three subzones: arctic, lichen-moss and south-bushes. Even the names show how the plant world is changing as it moves away from the North Pole.

The natural continuation of the tundra

Then the territory begins, very slightly different from the one described above. What are the tundra and forest-tundra? How are they different? Some specialists do not find much difference and are called the second subzone of the first. And the truth is, there are not many differences. The forest tundra belongs to the subarctic zone, stretches, completely repeating the southern boundary 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, they are found by rare islets. But since the forest-tundra comes very close to the coniferous forests, and its southern regions are also more or less covered by them, it is often called a subzone not of the tundra, but of the taiga.