North American Arctic

The North American Arctic is the portion of the Arctic lying above the Arctic Circle in the United States, Canada, and Greenland (Denmark), including Alaska, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. It is bounded by the Bering Strait in the west and by the Arctic Ocean, Hudson Bay, the Gulf of Alaska, and the North Atlantic, and its climate is defined by long, intensely cold winters and average July temperatures below 10 degrees Celsius, the threshold used to mark Arctic conditions. Permafrost and a short growing season keep the landscape treeless, dominated instead by tundra vegetation, glaciers, and snow and ice cover for most of the year, and it supports wildlife such as polar bears, muskoxen, walruses, and seals. Indigenous peoples including the Inuit, Yupik, Aleut, Athabascans, and Inupiat have lived in the region for thousands of years, and climate change is now altering the sea ice, temperatures, and wildlife patterns their traditional hunting and fishing depend on. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/