ABSTRACT

The largest permafrost areas in the northern hemisphere stretch across both the northern part of North America and from southwestern Europe to Eastern Siberia. In the latter area, the associated vegetation ranges from alpine and meadow tundra in Scandinavia, south and east into the Taiga, which is the most extensive forest in the world. In spite of the long, severe, winter climate, humans have been using permafrost lands for a very long time. Although the overall effect of expansion of Humans was to commence a wave of extinctions of both plants and animals, they domesticated some species that they found to be useful for their survival. Much of the southern margins of the present-day active permafrost zone is underlain at depth by relict permafrost formed during the previous major cold events, represented elsewhere by major glacial deposits.