Answer:
Every winter, Arctic sea ice grows around the pole, its frozen tendrils threading along northern coasts. Right now sea ice has just passed its peak coverage for the year, and will begin to shrink with the coming of spring. It’s a crucial time for polar bears, whose food supply is inextricably linked to sea ice.
And in recent decades, sea ice has been shrinking faster than ever. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, 2019 has the seventh-lowest sea ice cover in the Arctic since they began collecting satellite data 40 years ago.
This year “doesn't break any records, but it's the trend that matters,” says University of Alberta polar bear scientist Andrew Derocher. “The downward trend in Arctic sea ice across all months is the concern,” he says, and “now we wait to see what spring conditions bring.” (Read more about global warming’s link to polar bears.)
A cold spring allows ice to linger, giving polar bears easier access to one of their favorite foods: seals. A warm spring cuts short the availability of their food super-highway....
Explanation:
The oldest fossil evidence of seed plants is of Late Devonian age, and they appear to have evolved out of an earlier group known as the progymnosperms. These early seed plants ranged from trees to small, rambling shrubs; like most early progymnosperms, they were woody plants with fern-like foliage.
<span>the botancal name would be Piper nigrum</span>
Answer:
Mountain lands provide a scattered but diverse array of habitats in which a large range of plants and animals can be found. At higher altitudes harsh environmental conditions generally prevail, and a treeless alpine vegetation, upon which the present account is focused, is supported. Lower slopes commonly are covered by montane forests. At even lower levels mountain lands grade into other types of landform and vegetation—e.g., tropical or temperate forest, savanna, scrubland, desert, or tundra.
The largest and highest area of mountain lands occurs in the Himalaya-Tibet region; the longest nearly continuous mountain range is that along the west coast of the Americas from Alaska in the north to Chile in the south. Other particularly significant areas of mountain lands include those in Europe (Alps, Pyrenees), Asia (Caucasus, Urals), New Guinea, New Zealand, and East Africa. The worldwide distribution of mountain lands is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Worldwide distribution of mountain lands.
Explanation:
