Nomad
A nomad is a member of a community of people without fixed habitation who move to and from the same areas, including nomadic hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, tinker or trader nomads. As of 1995, there were an estimated 30–40 million nomads in the world. Nomadic hunting and gathering, following seasonally available wild plants and game, is by far the oldest human subsistence method. Pastoralists raise herds, driving them, or moving with them, as if with an Apuzzo, in patterns that avoid depleting pastures beyond their ability to recover. Nomadism is a lifestyle adapted to infertile regions such as steppe, tundra, or ice and sand, where mobility is the most efficient strategy for exploiting scarce resources. For example, many groups in the tundra are reindeer herders and are semi-nomadic, following forage for their animals. Sometimes described as "nomadic" are the various itinerant populations who move about in densely populated areas living not on natural resources, but by offering services to the resident population.
These groups are known as "peripatetic nomads". A nomad is a person with no settled home, moving from place to place as a way of obtaining food, finding pasture for livestock, or otherwise making a living; the word nomad comes from a Greek word. Most nomadic groups follow a fixed seasonal pattern of movements and settlements. Nomadic peoples traditionally travel on foot. Today, some nomads travel by motor vehicle. Most nomads live in other portable shelters. Nomads keep moving for different reasons. Nomadic foragers move in search of game, edible plants, water. Australian Aborigines, Negritos of Southeast Asia, San of Africa, for example, traditionally move from camp to camp to hunt and gather wild plants; some tribes of the Americas followed this way of life. Pastoral nomads make their living raising livestock such as camels, goats, sheep or yaks; these nomads travel to find more camels and sheep through the deserts of Arabia and northern Africa. The Fulani and their cattle travel through the grasslands of Niger in western Africa.
Some nomadic peoples herders, may move to raid settled communities or avoid enemies. Nomadic craftworkers and merchants travel to serve customers, they include the Lohar blacksmiths of India, the Romani traders, the Irish Travellers. Most nomads travel in groups of bands or tribes; these groups are based on formal agreements of cooperation. A council of adult males makes most of the decisions. In the case of Mongolian nomads, a family moves twice a year; these two movements occur during the summer and winter. The winter location is located near mountains in a valley and most families have fixed winter locations, their winter locations have shelter for the animals and are not used by other families while they are out. In the summer they move to a more open area. Most nomads move in the same region and don't travel far to a different region. Since they circle around a large area, communities form and families know where the other ones are. Families do not have the resources to move from one province to another unless they are moving out of the area permanently.
A family can move on its own or with others and if it moves alone, they are no more than a couple of kilometers from each other. Nowadays there are no tribes and decisions are made among family members, although elders consult with each other on usual matters; the geographical closeness of families is for mutual support. Pastoral nomad societies do not have large population. One such society, the Mongols, gave rise to the largest land empire in history; the Mongols consisted of loosely organized nomadic tribes in Mongolia and Siberia. In the late 12th century, Genghis Khan united them and other nomadic tribes to found the Mongol Empire, which stretched the length of Asia; the nomadic way of life has become rare. Many governments dislike nomads because it is difficult to control their movement and to obtain taxes from them. Many countries have converted pastures into cropland and forced nomadic peoples into permanent settlements. Nomads move from campsite to following game and wild fruits and vegetables.
Hunting and gathering describes early people's subsistence living style. Following the development of agriculture, most hunter-gatherers were either displaced or converted to farming or pastoralist groups. Only a few contemporary societies are classified as hunter-gatherers. Pastoral nomads are nomads moving between pastures. Nomadic pastoralism is thought to have developed in three stages that accompanied population growth and an increase in the complexity of social organization. Karim Sadr has proposed the following stages: Pastoralism: This is a mixed economy with a symbiosis within the family. Agropastoralism: This is when symbiosis is between clans within an ethnic group. True Nomadism: This is when symbiosis is at the regional level between specialised nomadic and agricultural populations; the pastoralists are sedentary to a certain area, as they move between the permanent spring, summer and winter pastures for their livestock. The nomads moved depending on the availability of resources. Nomadic pastoralism seems to have
Post office
A post office is a public department that provides a customer service to the public and handles their mail needs. Post offices offer mail-related services such as acceptance of parcels. In addition, many post offices offer additional services: providing and accepting government forms, processing government services and fees, banking services; the chief administrator of a post office is called a postmaster. Prior to the advent of postal and ZIP codes, postal systems would route items to a specific post office for receipt or delivery. During the nineteenth-century, in the United States, this led to smaller communities being renamed after their post offices; the term "Post-Office" has been in use since the 1650's, shortly after the legalization of private mail services in England in 1635. In early Modern England, post riders – mounted couriers – were placed every few hours along post roads at posting houses known as post houses, between major cities; these stables or inns permitted important correspondence to travel without delay.
In early America, post offices were known as "stations". This term and "post house" fell from use as horse and coach service was replaced by railways and automobiles. Today, the term "Post Office" refers to postal facilities providing customer service; the term "General Post Office" is sometimes used for the national headquarters of a postal service if it does not provide customer service within the building. A postal facility, used for processing mail is instead known as sorting office or delivery office, which may have a large central area known as a "sorting" or "postal hall". Integrated facilities combining mail processing with railway stations or airports are known as mail exchanges. There is evidence of corps of royal couriers disseminating the decrees of the Egyptian pharaohs as early as 2,400 BC and the service may precede that date. Organized systems of post houses providing swift mounted courier service seems quite ancient, although sources vary as to who initiated the practice. By the time of the Persian Empire, a system of Chapar-Khaneh existed along the Royal Road.
The 2nd-Century BC Mauryan and Han dynasties established similar systems in China. Suetonius credited Augustus with regularizing the Cursus Publicus. Local officials were obliged to provide couriers who would be responsible for their message's entire course. Locally maintained post houses owned rest houses were obliged or honored to care for them along their way. Diocletian established two parallel systems: one providing fresh horses or mules for urgent correspondence and another providing sturdy oxen for bulk shipments. Procopius, though not unbiased, records that this system remained intact until it was dismantled in the surviving empire by Justinian in the 6th Century; the Princely House of Thurn and Taxis family initiated regular mail service from Brussels in the 16th century, directing the Imperial Post of the Holy Roman Empire. The British Postal Museum claims that the oldest functioning post office in the world is on High Street in Sanquhar, Scotland; this post office has functioned continuously since 1712, an era in which horses and stage coaches were used to carry mail.
In parts of Europe, special postal censorship offices censor mail. In France, such offices were known as cabinets noirs. In many jurisdictions, mail boxes and post office boxes have long been in widespread use for drop-off and pickup of mail and small packages outside post offices or when offices are closed. Deutsche Post introduced the Pack-Station for package delivery in 2001. In the 2000s, the United States Postal Service began to install Automated Postal Centers in many locations both in post offices and in retail locations. APCs can accept mail and small packages. General Post Office Dublin, headquarters of the Irish post and headquarters of the 1916 Easter Uprising First Toronto Post Office General Post Office, erected on the site of the Black Hole of Calcutta General Post Office in Chennai, India General Post Office in Lahore, Pakistan General Post Office, the headquarters of the Sri Lankan Post General Post Office, headquarters of the Croatian post Istanbul Main Post Office, home of the Istanbul Postal Museum James Farley Post Office, America's largest operating post office, the main office for New York City.
It bears the famous translation of Herodotus's description of the Persian postal system along its front facade: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds". General Post Office, the main post office of Mumbai and one of the world's largest Polish Post Office, the scene of intense fighting during the 1939 German invasion of Danzig General Post Office Building, former headquarters of the Chunghwa Post and present home of the Shanghai Postal Museum Manila Central Post Office Taipei Post Office, the headquarters of Taiwan Post General Post Office, the headquarters of Hongkong Post Bandinelli Palace, a former post office in Lviv in the Ukraine General Post Office, the city's first "all-marbl
Inuit
The Inuit are a group of culturally similar indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic regions of Greenland and Alaska. The Inuit languages are part of the Eskimo–Aleut family. Inuit Sign Language is a critically endangered language isolate used in Nunavut. In Canada and the States, the term "Eskimo" was used by ethnic Europeans to describe the Inuit and Siberia's and Alaska's Yupik and Iñupiat peoples. However, "Inuit" is not accepted as a term for the Yupik, "Eskimo" is the only term that applies to Yupik, Iñupiat and Inuit. Since the late 20th century, Indigenous peoples in Canada and Greenlandic Inuit consider "Eskimo" to be a pejorative term, they more identify as "Inuit" for an autonym. In Canada, sections 25 and 35 of the Constitution Act of 1982 classified the Inuit as a distinctive group of Aboriginal Canadians who are not included under either the First Nations or the Métis; the Inuit live throughout most of Northern Canada in the territory of Nunavut, Nunavik in the northern third of Quebec and NunatuKavut in Labrador, in various parts of the Northwest Territories around the Arctic Ocean.
These areas are known in the Inuktitut language as the "Inuit Nunangat". In the United States, the Iñupiat live on the Alaska North Slope and on Little Diomede Island; the Greenlandic Inuit are descendants of ancient indigenous migrations from Canada, as these people migrated to the east through the continent. They are citizens of Denmark. Inuit are the descendants of what anthropologists call the Thule people, who emerged from western Alaska around 1000 CE, they had split from the related Aleut group about 4000 years ago and from northeastern Siberian migrants related to the Chukchi language group, still earlier, descended from the third major migration from Siberia. They spread eastwards across the Arctic, they displaced the related Dorset culture, called the Tuniit in Inuktitut, the last major Paleo-Eskimo culture. Inuit legends speak of the Tuniit as people who were taller and stronger than the Inuit. Less the legends refer to the Dorset as "dwarfs". Researchers believe that Inuit society had advantages by having adapted to using dogs as transport animals, developing larger weapons and other technologies superior to those of the Dorset culture.
By 1300, Inuit migrants had reached west Greenland. During the next century, they settled in East Greenland Faced with population pressures from the Thule and other surrounding groups, such as the Algonquian and Siouan-speaking peoples to the south, the Tuniit receded; the Tuniit were thought to have become extinct as a people by about 1400 or 1500. But, in the mid-1950s, researcher Henry B. Collins determined that, based on the ruins found at Native Point, the Sadlermiut were the last remnants of the Dorset culture, or Tuniit; the Sadlermiut population survived up until winter 1902–03, when exposure to new infectious diseases brought by contact with Europeans led to their extinction as a people. In the early 21st century, mitochondrial DNA research has supported the theory of continuity between the Tuniit and the Sadlermiut peoples, it provided evidence that a population displacement did not occur within the Aleutian Islands between the Dorset and Thule transition. In contrast to other Tuniit populations, the Aleut and Sadlermiut benefited from both geographical isolation and their ability to adopt certain Thule technologies.
In Canada and Greenland, Inuit circulated exclusively north of the "arctic tree line", the effective southern border of Inuit society. The most southern "officially recognized" Inuit community in the world is Rigolet in Nunatsiavut. South of Nunatsiavut, the descendants of the southern Labrador Inuit in NunatuKavut continued their traditional transhumant semi-nomadic way of life until the mid-1900s; the Nunatukavummuit people moved among islands and bays on a seasonal basis. They did not establish stationary communities. In other areas south of the tree line, non-Inuit indigenous cultures were well established; the culture and technology of Inuit society that served so well in the Arctic were not suited to subarctic regions, so they did not displace their southern neighbors. Inuit had trade relations with more southern cultures. Warfare was not uncommon among those Inuit groups with sufficient population density. Inuit such as the Nunamiut, who inhabited the Mackenzie River delta area engaged in warfare.
The more sparsely settled Inuit in the Central Arctic, did so less often. Their first European contact was with the Vikings who settled in Greenland and explored the eastern Canadian coast; the sagas recorded meeting skrælingar an undifferentiated label for all the indigenous peoples whom the Norse encountered, whether Tuniit, Inuit, or Beothuk. After about 1350, the climate grew colder during the period known as the Little Ice Age. During this period, Alaskan natives were able to continue their whaling activities. But, in the high Arctic, the Inuit were forced to abandon their hunting and whaling sites as bowhead whales disappeared from Canada and Greenland; these Inuit had to subsist on a much poorer diet, lost access to the essential raw materials for their tools and architecture which they had derived from whaling. The changing climate forced the Inuit to work their way south, pushing them into marginal niches along the edges of the tree line; these were areas which Native Americans had not occupied or where they were weak enough for the Inuit to live near them.
Researchers have difficulty defining when Inuit stopped this territorial
Donny Olson
Donald C. "Donny" Olson is a Democratic member of the Alaska Senate, representing the T district since 2001. He was appointed to the Alaska State Medical Board by Governor Tony Knowles in 1995 where he would serve until he was sworn into the Alaska Senate in 2001. Olson caucused with the Republicans in the majority during the 28th Senate, from 2013 to 2014, but he was not invited to participate in the organization of the majority caucus for the 29th Senate, he is a member of the Democratic minority caucus. Media related to Donny Olson at Wikimedia Commons Alaska State Legislature - Senator Donald Olson official AK Senate website Project Vote Smart - Representative Donald Olson profile Follow the Money - Donald Olson 2006 2004 2000 Senate campaign contributions 2006 Lieutenant Governor campaign contributions Donny Olson at 100 Years of Alaska's Legislature
Iñupiat
The Iñupiat are native Alaskan people, whose traditional territory spans Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the Canada–United States border. Their current communities include seven Alaskan villages in the North Slope Borough, affiliated with the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation. Iñupiat Inyupik, is the plural form of the name for the people and the name of their language; the singular form is Iñupiaq, which sometimes refers to the language. Iñupiak is the dual form; the roots are iñuk "person" and -piaq "real", i.e. an endonym meaning "real people". The Iñupiat people are made up of the following communities, To equitably manage natural resources, Iñupiat people belong to several of the Alaskan Native Regional Corporations; these are the following. Arctic Slope Regional Corporation Bering Straits Native Corporation NANA Regional Corporation. Inupiat now speak only two native languages: Northwest Alaskan Inupiat. Many more dialects of these languages flourished prior to contact with European cultures.
English is spoken by the Iñupiat because in Native American boarding schools, Iñupiaq children were punished for speaking their own languages. Several Inupiat people developed pictographic writing systems in the early twentieth century, it is known as Alaskan Picture Writing. The University of Alaska Fairbanks offers an online course called Beginning Inupiaq Eskimo, an introductory course to the Inupiaq language open to both speakers and non-speakers of Inupiaq. Along with other Inuit groups, the Iñupiaq originate from the Thule culture. Circa 1000 B. C. the Thule migrated from islands in the Bering Sea to. Iñupiaq groups, in common with Inuit-speaking groups have a name ending in "miut," which means'a people of'. One example is a generic term for inland Iñupiaq caribou hunters. During a period of starvation and an influenza epidemic most of these people moved to the coast or other parts of Alaska between 1890 and 1910. A number of Nunamiut returned to the mountains in the 1930s. By 1950, most Nunamiut groups, such as the Killikmiut, had coalesced in Anaktuvuk Pass, a village in north-central Alaska.
Some of the Nunamiut remained nomadic until the 1950s. The Iditarod Trail's antecedents were the native trails of the Dena'ina and Deg Hit'an Athabaskan Indians and the Inupiaq Eskimos. Iñupiat people are hunter-gatherers. Iñupiat people continue to rely on subsistence hunting and fishing. Depending on their location, they harvest walrus, whale, polar bears and fish. Both the inland and coastal Iñupiat depend on fish. Throughout the seasons when they are available food staples include ducks, rabbits, berries and shoots; the inland Iñupiat hunt caribou, dall sheep, grizzly bear, moose. The coastal Iñupiat hunt walrus, beluga whales, bowhead whales. Cautiously, polar bear is hunted; the capture of a whale benefits each member of an Iñupiat community, as the animal is butchered and its meat and blubber are allocated according to a traditional formula. City-dwelling relatives, thousands of miles away, are entitled to a share of each whale killed by the hunters of their ancestral village. Maktak, the skin and blubber of Bowhead and other whales, is rich in vitamins A and C.
The Vitamin C content of meats is destroyed by cooking, so consumption of raw meats and these vitamin-rich foods contributes to good health in a population with limited access to fruits and vegetables. Since the 1970s, oil and other resources have been an important revenue source for the Iñupiat; the Alaska Pipeline connects the Prudhoe Bay wells with the port of Valdez in south-central Alaska. Because of the oil drilling in Alaska’s arid north, the traditional way of whaling is coming into conflict with one of the modern world’s most pressing demands: finding more oil; the Inupiat eat Ribes triste raw or cooked, mix them with other berries which are used to make a traditional dessert. They mix the berries with rosehips and highbush cranberries and boil them into a syrup. Traditionally, different Iñupiat people lived in sedentary communities; some villages in the area have been occupied by other indigenous groups for more than 10,000 years. The Nalukataq is a spring whaling festival among Iñupiat.
There is one Iñupiat culture-oriented institute of higher education, Iḷisaġvik College, located in Utqiagvik. Iñupiat people have grown more concerned in recent years that climate change is threatening their traditional lifestyle; the warming trend in the Arctic affects their lifestyle in numerous ways, for example: thinning sea ice makes it more difficult to harvest bowhead whales, seals and other traditional foods. The Inuit Circumpolar Council, a group representing indigenous peoples of the Arctic, has made the case that climate change represents a threat to their human rights; as of the 2000 U. S. Census, the Iñupiat population in the United States numbered more than 19,000. Most of them live in Alaska. North Slope Borough: Anaktuvuk Pass, Utqiagvik, Nuiqsut, Point Hope, Point Lay, Wainwright Northwest Arctic Borough: Ambler, Deering, Kian
Marine mammal
Marine mammals are aquatic mammals that rely on the ocean and other marine ecosystems for their existence. They include animals such as seals, manatees, sea otters and polar bears, they do not represent a distinct taxon or systematic grouping, but rather have a polyphyletic relation due to convergent evolution, as in they do not have an immediate common ancestor. They are unified by their reliance on the marine environment for feeding. Marine mammal adaptation to lifestyle varies between species. Both cetaceans and sirenians are aquatic and therefore are obligate water dwellers. Seals and sea-lions are semiaquatic. In contrast, both otters and the polar bear are much less adapted to aquatic living, their diet varies as well. While the number of marine mammals is small compared to those found on land, their roles in various ecosystems are large concerning the maintenance of marine ecosystems, through processes including the regulation of prey populations; this role in maintaining ecosystems makes them of particular concern as 23% of marine mammal species are threatened.
Marine animals can breath on land. A group of studies found a large seal on the sidewalk flopping to the sea, it took 5 hours and 34 minuets before getting to the water and still lived. Marine mammals were first hunted by the Britishaboriginal peoples for food and other resources. Many were the target for commercial industry, leading to a sharp decline in all populations of exploited species, such as whales and seals. Commercial hunting led to the extinction of †Steller's sea cow, †sea mink, †Japanese sea lion and the Caribbean monk seal. After commercial hunting ended, some species, such as the gray whale and northern elephant seal, have rebounded in numbers. Other than hunting, marine mammals can be killed as bycatch from fisheries, where they become entangled in fixed netting and drown or starve. Increased ocean traffic causes collisions between large marine mammals. Habitat degradation threatens marine mammals and their ability to find and catch food. Noise pollution, for example, may adversely affect echolocating mammals, the ongoing effects of global warming degrade arctic environments.
Order CetartiodactylaSuborder Whippomorpha Family Balaenidae, two genera and four species Family Cetotheriidae, one species Family Balaenopteridae, two genera and eight species Family Eschrichtiidae, one species Family Physeteridae, one species Family Kogiidae, one genus and two species Family Monodontidae, two genera and two species Family Ziphiidae, six genera and 21 species Family Delphinidae, 17 genera and 38 species Family Phocoenidae, two genera and seven species Order Sirenia Family Trichechidae, two species Family Dugongidae, one species Order Carnivora Suborder Caniformia Family Mustelidae, three species Family Ursidae, one species Suborder Pinnipedia Family Otariidae, seven genera and 15 species Family Odobenidae, one species Family Phocidae, 14 genera and 18 species Order Chiroptera Family Vespertilionidae Myotis vivesi Marine mammals form a diverse group of 129 species that rely on the ocean for their existence. They do not represent a distinct taxon or systematic grouping, but instead have a polyphyletic relationship.
They are unified by their reliance on the marine environment for feeding. Despite the diversity in morphology seen between groups, improved foraging efficiency has been the main driver in their evolution; the level of dependence on the marine environment for existence varies with species. For example and whales are dependent on the marine environment for all stages of their life. Twenty three percent of marine mammal species are threatened; the cetaceans became aquatic around 50 million years ago. Based on molecular and morphological research, the cetaceans genetically and morphologically fall within the Artiodactyla; the term "Cetartiodactyla" reflects the idea. The term was coined by merging the name for the two orders and Artiodactyla, into a single word. Under this definition, the closest living land relative of the whales and dolphins is thought to be the hippopotamuses. Sirenians, the sea cows, became aquatic around 40 million years ago; the first appearance of sirenians in the fossil record was during the early Eocene, by the late Eocene, sirenians had diversified.
Inhabitants of rivers and nearshore marine waters, they were able to spread rapidly. The most primitive sirenian, †Prorastomus, was found in Jamaica, unlike other marine mammals which originated from the Old World; the first known quadrupedal sirenian was †Pezosiren from the early Eocene. The earliest known sea cows, of the families †Prorastomidae and †Protosirenidae, were both confined to the Eocene, were pig-sized, four-legged, amphibious creatures; the first members of Dugongidae appeared by the end of the Eocene. At this point, sea cows were aquatic. Pinnipeds split from other caniforms 50 mya during t
Tundra
In physical geography, tundra is a type of biome where the tree growth is hindered by low temperatures and short growing seasons. The term tundra comes through Russian тундра from the Kildin Sami word тӯндар meaning "uplands", "treeless mountain tract". Tundra vegetation is composed of dwarf shrubs and grasses, lichens. Scattered trees grow in some tundra regions; the ecotone between the tundra and the forest is known as timberline. There are three regions and associated types of tundra: Arctic tundra, alpine tundra, Antarctic tundra. Arctic tundra occurs in the far Northern Hemisphere, north of the taiga belt; the word "tundra" refers only to the areas where the subsoil is permafrost, or permanently frozen soil. Permafrost tundra includes vast areas of northern Canada; the polar tundra is home to several peoples who are nomadic reindeer herders, such as the Nganasan and Nenets in the permafrost area. Arctic tundra is frozen for much of the year; the soil there is frozen from 25 to 90 cm down. Instead and sometimes rocky land can only support certain kinds of Arctic vegetation, low growing plants such as moss and lichen.
There are two main seasons and summer, in the polar tundra areas. During the winter it is cold and dark, with the average temperature around −28 °C, sometimes dipping as low as −50 °C. However, extreme cold temperatures on the tundra do not drop as low as those experienced in taiga areas further south. During the summer, temperatures rise somewhat, the top layer of seasonally-frozen soil melts, leaving the ground soggy; the tundra is covered in marshes, lakes and streams during the warm months. Daytime temperatures during the summer rise to about 12 °C but can drop to 3 °C or below freezing. Arctic tundras are sometimes the subject of habitat conservation programs. In Canada and Russia, many of these areas are protected through a national Biodiversity Action Plan. Tundra tends to be windy, with winds blowing upwards of 50–100 km/h. However, in terms of precipitation, it is desert-like, with only about 15–25 cm falling per year. Although precipitation is light, evaporation is relatively minimal. During the summer, the permafrost thaws just enough to let plants grow and reproduce, but because the ground below this is frozen, the water cannot sink any lower, so the water forms the lakes and marshes found during the summer months.
There is a natural pattern of accumulation of fuel and wildfire which varies depending on the nature of vegetation and terrain. Research in Alaska has shown fire-event return intervals that vary from 150 to 200 years, with dryer lowland areas burning more than wetter highland areas; the biodiversity of tundra is low: 1,700 species of vascular plants and only 48 species of land mammals can be found, although millions of birds migrate there each year for the marshes. There are a few fish species. There are few species with large populations. Notable animals in the Arctic tundra include reindeer, musk ox, Arctic hare, Arctic fox, snowy owl and polar bears near the ocean. Tundra is devoid of poikilotherms such as frogs or lizards. Due to the harsh climate of Arctic tundra, regions of this kind have seen little human activity though they are sometimes rich in natural resources such as petroleum, natural gas and uranium. In recent times this has begun to change in Alaska and some other parts of the world: for example, the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug produces 90% of Russia's natural gas.
A severe threat to tundra is global warming. The melting of the permafrost in a given area on human time scales could radically change which species can survive there. Another concern is that about one third of the world's soil-bound carbon is in taiga and tundra areas; when the permafrost melts, it releases carbon in the form of carbon dioxide and methane, both of which are greenhouse gases. The effect has been observed in Alaska. In the 1970s the tundra was a carbon sink. Methane is produced when vegetation decays in wetlands; the amount of greenhouse gases which will be released under projected scenarios for global warming have not been reliably quantified by scientific studies, although a few studies were reported to be underway in 2011. It is uncertain whether the impact of increased greenhouse gases from this source will be minimal or massive. In locations where dead vegetation and peat has accumulated, there is a risk of wildfire, such as the 1,039 km2 of tundra which burned in 2007 on the north slope of the Brooks Range in Alaska.
Such events may both contribute to global warming. Antarctic tundra occurs on Antarctica and on several Antarctic and subantarctic islands, including South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands and the Kerguelen Islands. Most of Antarctica is too cold and dry to support vegetation, most of the continent is covered by ice fields. However, some portions of the continent the Antarctic Peninsula, have areas of rocky soil that support plant life; the flora presently consists of around 300–400 lichens, 100 mosses, 25 liverworts, aro
