There is a completely special territory on Earth: the most northern outskirts of Asia and the northern part of the American continent, as well as the island territory of the Arctic, enclosed by the borders of the polar belt.
What is the zone of arctic deserts? First of all, it is a special climate where there is no clear division into seasons. There simply exists a winter, which is characterized by a polar night with a temperature regime ranging from ten to fifty degrees with a minus sign, and a very short summer with a polar day and a temperature not exceeding the zero mark on the thermometer.
The Arctic desert zone has a specific landscape: ice and snow cover huge island areas. Franz Josef Archipelago is eighty-seven percent covered in ice, the northern island of Novaya Zemlya is forty percent covered, and Ushakov’s islands are almost completely ice-bound. Northern land (islands) is forty-five percent covered by twenty-two ice sheets.
The Arctic desert zone of Russia includes territories from the northernmost point (Franz Josef Land) to the southernmost (Wrangel Island) island of Novaya Zemlya, Novosibirsk Islands, Northern Land, the outskirts of the Taimyr Peninsula, as well as the Arctic seas located within this section.
The area of Arctic deserts is covered with snow and icebound almost all year round. Precipitation here is very rare. Their annual norm is 200-300 millimeters, and they are mainly represented by snow and hoarfrost. The climate of the Arctic deserts is exacerbated by strong winds, frequent dense fogs and great cloud cover.
The relief of the islands is mostly similar. It is a flat plain on coastal areas and high mountains inland. A uniform plain relief is characteristic only of the Novosibirsk islands. On the islands of the Arctic territory of the former Soviet Union, almost fifty-six thousand square meters of area is icing area. The ice sheet of Novaya Zemlya is three hundred in thickness, Severnaya Zemlya is two hundred, and Franz Josef Land is one hundred meters. The maximum permafrost thickness (north of the Taimyr Peninsula) exceeds five hundred meters.
What can surprise the zone of Arctic deserts in terms of vegetation? Well, the very fact of its presence in the permafrost zone is already surprising. This zone is absolutely definitely called a desert, since the plant world is poor and monotonous here. The vegetation cover is torn, and the total cover does not exceed sixty-five percent. And the inner part of the islands (mountain peaks, slopes) is covered by no more than three percent. The vegetation of this region is represented by mosses, lichens (mainly scale), algae. Flowering plants of the Arctic are represented by Alpine foxtail, Arctic pike, ranunculus, snowbreaker, polar poppy. Three hundred and fifty species of higher plants represent the arctic island flora, the nature of which differs significantly in the northern part from the southern.
If the northern part of the Taimyr Peninsula is characterized by grass-moss arctic deserts, then to the south - the Novosibirsk Islands - there is a replacement for depleted shrub-moss deserts with the appearance of polar willow and saxifrage. But the ice zone of the south, also represented by shrub-moss arctic deserts, is already a well-developed shrub layer with polar and arctic willow and dryads.
Due to the low productivity of the vegetation cover, the fauna of the Arctic desert zone is very poor: lemmings and arctic foxes, polar bears and reindeer, walruses and seals in some places. In Greenland, you can meet a musky bull. The rocky coast in the summer is the place of colonial nesting of seabirds. Loon and seagull, guillemot and scrub, goose and, of course, polar owl represent the kingdom of birds living in the most difficult conditions of icy deserts.