Introduction

Although the majority of the tundra biome exists in the northern latitudes of Earth, the islands surrounding the Antarctic continent are considered to be tundra, as well.

While most of the frozen landmass of Antarctica sustains no producers to support an ecosystem, the perimeter of the continent and surrounding islands share some of the same types of plant life as the northern tundra regions.

But, unlike the northern tundra, the Antarctic tundra is not home to any large mammals.

With the majority of the land existing as islands, these ecosystems support aquatic animals like seals and penguins.

The food chains that these sea and land animals belong to exist as both terrestrial and marine feeding relationships and include large marine mammals like killer and humpback whales.

Like all other ecosystems on Earth, the food chains that exist in the Antarctic region are fragile and can fall apart with the addition or removal of biotic and abiotic factors.

The greatest risk to these ecosystems is global climate change.

As the human population has increased over the last few hundred years, the use of resources that emit gases into the atmosphere has slowly changed its composition.

These gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, are good at trapping heat. Because of this we call them greenhouse gases.

Like the thermostat in a home, we rely on greenhouse gases to keep our planet within a suitable temperature range for life.

However, when the concentrations of these gases increase rapidly, the total amount of heat trapped also increases.

This change is more rapid than what would naturally happen, and ecosystems can struggle to adapt to the changes.

For example, in the northern Arctic regions of the tundra, melting ice sheets pose a problem for polar bears.

Polar bears are opportunistic carnivores, meaning that they’ll eat just about anything they can get their paws on.

As poor hunters on land, they might catch the occasional caribou or raid a bird’s nest for eggs, but their real talent is in catching seals. Seals under the ice sheets use their teeth to rake open and maintain a breathing hole between fishing dives.

Patient polar bears wait, motionless, at these breathing holes and ambush the unsuspecting seal as it emerges.

Without ice sheets, polar bears cannot catch seals. And without seals on the menu, starvation is a big risk.

In the lower portion of the tundra, the musk ox grazes on grasses. As the warm season lengthens with global climate change, so does the amount of slugs in these grasses.

Slugs in this region are prime carriers of parasites, like the lung worm, that can kill a musk ox. As these giant primary consumers feed on grasses, slugs and their slime trails are also consumed, containing these parasites.

As the average temperature of the tundra creeps upward each year, the layer of permafrost in the ground slowly melts, releasing once-trapped methane into the atmosphere.

1 unit of methane, a greenhouse gas, has the heat-trapping power of 50 units of carbon dioxide, adding to further overall warming.

All life on Earth is intimately connected to its environment.

And, unlike humans, the rest of life is unable to use technology to adapt quickly to environmental changes.

It is up to us to monitor the effects of global climate change and work to sustain our delicate ecosystems.