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Tundra is, according to the good folks at HowSutffWorks, "a treeless region located in the Arctic or at high altitudes. Tundra occurring in the Arctic is known as arctic tundra, that at high altitudes is called alpine tundra. Both types are relatively flat, and they have similar climates and vegetation. The main difference between the two, besides location, is that permafrost (permanently frozen ground) underlies virtually all of the arctic tundra but is rare in alpine tundra."
Not surprisingly, the warm season in a tundra is rather short. As a result, plant life is limited to grasses, mosses, lichens, and shrubs. But—thanks yet again to global warming?all that is changing.
Jeremy Elton Jacquot of TreeHugger has written about the advance of boreal forests in the high Arctic. These forests, Jacquot explains, have begun to supplant the region's tundras and this "threatens to accelerate the impact of global warming by reducing the region's albedo effect."
Albedo Effect: "When the sun's rays hit either snow or ice, they are reflected back into space instead of being absorbed, reducing heat collection. The spread of forests, which both creates more dark surfaces and removes white ones, would thus result in more sunlight being absorbed. This would only compound warming in the region, which is already moving at a fast clip due to the thinning of ice sheets and record melting of sea-surface ice."
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