Tundra

Tundra

Ringing the polar ice caps where biting winds and bone-chilling cold prevent trees from growing, the tundra is a vast, treeless biome anchored by permafrost—a dense subterranean layer of soil and dead plant matter that has remained frozen solid since the last Ice Age. While seemingly desolate and desert-dry, this fragile landscape undergoes an astonishing transformation during the fleeting weeks of the midnight sun, thawing at the surface to explode into a vibrant, marshy mosaic of miniature wildflowers, mosses, and millions of nesting migratory birds.

Photo by Greg Garnhart on Unsplash