Is Climate Change Icing Out Rudolph?

Arctic winters increasingly alternate between mild and freezing so the tundra is covered in ice instead of snow, preventing reindeer from digging for food — but longer autumns may help them survive

A Svalbard reindeer, Rangifer platyrhynchus, searching for food near the top of Fjordnibba, on the south-eastern side of Tempelfjorden on Spitsbergen, in late April. (Credit: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen / CC BY-SA 4.0)

Thanks to climate change, temperatures are rising around the globe, but they are rising fastest at the Poles. Temperature records have shown that in the Arctic, temperatures are rising three times faster than the global annual average. But as climate changes, it’s not just the average temperature that increases, but climactic variability increases too, and this is creating many unanticipated environmental problems.