No Hills in the Tundra

 

Learn something new every day :)!   Today I learned of  Pingos of Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwestern Territories of Canada.  They look like large hills on the Arctic tundra (but the Artic tundra has no true hills, but they are actually mounds filled with ice, not dirt or rock. Ice melts and freezes, depending on the temperature, it ice takes up more space than water at times pushing the surface of the earth upwards.  . In the Arctic, it can be moved upwards of 230 feet tall.  During summer, the temperature is warm enough for more water to enter and the next winter, when it freezes again, the ground is pushed further upward. Pingos exist only in the high Arctic in Canada, Alaska, Greenland, Russia and the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.

Pingos grow by only a couple of centimetres per year, so one that is 70 metres tall has taken hundreds of years to form. A park called Pingo National Landmark, near Tuktoyaktuk was created to protect eight pingos from being damaged by all-terrain-vehicles or excavation. One of the Pingos, called Ibyuk Pingo, is Canada’s largest and the second largest in the world. The largest one is in Alaska. Ibyuk continues to grow at a rate of about two cm (about 0.79 inches) per year and is estimated to more than 1,000 years old. If you don’t know what they are, you might think it is just a hill; but the Arctic tundra is flat and treeless and does not have hills like a pingo.

 Tuktoyaktuk... the town with about 900 residents.. mostly Indigenous persons.