A lush knee-high jungle grows in the Arctic, but warming is changing Earth’s mini-greenhouse

Onion Portage, a critical migration route for the Western Arctic Caribou Herd along the Kobuk River near Ambler, Alaska, is visible, Sept. 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Annika Hammerschlag, File)

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TOOLIK LAKE, Alaska (AP) — With no tall trees reaching to the sky, Alaska’s North Slope tundra can look desolate — especially to outsiders from the Lower 48 who are used to in-your-face greenery.

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But up close, “the tundra’s kind of like the jungle,” said Adam Bloom, a Florida Atlantic University plant biology student. Except this lush Arctic jungle tops out at about 10 inches (25 centimeters).

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Together with Jake Francis, a professor at the university, Bloom walked through the spongy soil that was frozen solid a few weeks earlier. They towered over the knee-high dwarf birch trees. Showy rhododendrons didn’t reach the backs of their shoes as they walk in the North Slope, a vast and sparsely populated treeless area stretching from the Brooks mountain range to the Arctic Ocean.

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For centuries, Arctic cold has kept plant life small, a sort of dollhouse of Earth’s miniatures. The extreme environment has long given researchers a unique perspective on what makes plants grow, insight that would be hard to obtain elsewhere. Now it…

Original source: https://apnews.com/business