Agaro Lush Tundra

Geography

Agar Lush Tundra is a sub-polar lowland covering the arctic portion of the Twilight Age world. In many ways it is the antithesis of Aeni Mountains' dead alpine ice and Adisay's parched plains; this landscape is one of overwhelming cold life. The ground is a colossal field of rolling tundra, a morass of swampy moss basins, and frigid wetlands, where the temperature's extremity is the direct cause of abundant biological life, the explosive thaws, and constant groundwater saturation, which permeates the hostile northland.

Topography and geology

While Agar is a largely flat terrain when compared to the southern continental masses, the topography is extremely tumultuous at ground level. The tundra is a sprawling field of subtle, rolling hills cut through by low metamorphic ridges, gently carving river valleys, and wide thermokarst basins the result of millennia of sporadic permafrost collapse. At first sight it seems to be an undulating plain, soft and level, but the surface is a volatile, treacherous surface of deeply saturated peat bogs, hidden melt water channels, and deeply fractured stone.

The geologic makeup of the basin is one of a base of deeply compressed permafrost sediments overlaid with the thick layers of rotting peat, topped with dense glacial tills, all marked with the devastating effects of receding continental ice sheets that scoured the plains with massive boulder deposits, scattered ice-scoured outcrops, and remnants of metamorphic bedrock. With the ground subject to a constant freeze and thaw the land buckles and shifts, churning with immense forces from constant cryoturbation.

Climate and hydrography

Agar is an exceptionally harsh land in terms of climate, with each season possessing its own radical atmospheric conditions. While the winters are brutally dark and achingly long with ferocious wind beating against the endless tundra, the spring thaw turns Agar into a churning, flooding field where biological life explodes amidst the landscape changing flood waters, spurred on by the continuous daylight. In terms of hydrography, the tundra is extremely wet.

Being a completely frozen permafrost based land the deeper layers prevent drainage, and the immense meltwater collected from the springtime thaw remains at the very surface. This causes a colossal network of flooded peat bogs, braided river systems, and interconnected wetlands, and the interaction between these fields and the northern airmasses cause heavy, cold fog to be prevalent in the warmer months, or in winter, the polar winds create constant snow storms and the thaw often involves rapid cold snaps and freezes.

Traversability

Agar Lush Tundra is not an easy land to traverse, and its difficulty varies entirely by season. In the deep winter Agar freezes solid and the swampy terrain becomes solid highway of snow and ice. Traversing Agar during the spring thaw is, however, an incredibly tiresome, challenging task. The freezing ground collapses and floods, leaving travelers to march through a chest-high muskeg field, avoid numerous unseen thaws, and circle immense flooded rivers on an unending journey to find solid land.

Plants

Tundra Vegetation (Moss Plains and Cryptogamic Flora)

The flora in the Agaro Lush Tundra is an achievement of miniaturized biological productivity. Unlike the deeply established canopies of Acken, Agaro flora are governed by the shallow "active layer" of permafrost that begins to thaw with rising temperatures just above the frozen soil. To withstand the howling polar winds and conserve any and all heat possible, plants grow in completely prostrate, or flat on the ground, growth patterns. Vast, spongy plains of sphagnum moss, hardy, spread-out mats of lichen, and low, wind-resilient shrubbery carpet the moist land.

Because of the difficulty of deep taproot systems in freezing soil, roots extend horizontally instead, forming a tight and interwoven subterranean mat that actually insulates the ground beneath it. Agaro's tundra undergoes extreme seasonal color changes; in the rapid blooming of summer, it's a brilliant, vivid tapestry of emerald mosses, golden sedges, and red shrubbery, but as soon as the seasons change back, it reverts to its frosty silver and muted brown colors.

Wetland Flora (Muskeg and Peat Basin Vegetation)

The sunken bogs and thawed-out lakes are the habitats for vast muskeg (peat bog) systems, and they are the most productive cold wetlands on earth. They occur where meltwater can't penetrate the permafrost above and stays on the surface, making the area permanently waterlogged and oxygen-deprived. The sedges and reeds that thrive in this suffocating mud are capable of pumping oxygen through air-filled vascular tissue called aerenchyma directly to the submerged roots.

This organic material has extremely slow decomposition rates because the freezing temperatures and acidic environment preserve the material for millennia, creating giant, deep deposits of peat. Flooded basins can, therefore, be seen as biologically productive wetlands as well as carbon storage units.

Boreal Ridge Flora (Krummholz and Taiga Systems)

The wetter areas of Agaro are interspersed with areas of metomorphic ridges where more drained land supports isolated pockets of subarctic taiga systems. Here the winds are much more biting than in the bogs and they keep conifers small and stunted; these low growing, gnarled trees are also called krummholz, or crooked wood. The trees of these small pockets of taiga are also adapted to conserve moisture by having waxy, narrow leaves and are also very pliable so that heavy snow loads are deflected from the branches instead of breaking them.

Where the river valleys are more sheltered from the winds the pockets of taiga become much larger and denser, supporting resin-filled woodland corridors, before gradually thinning out again as they re-enter the barren tundra.

Seasonal Adaptations (Cryoprotectants and Rapid Phenology)

Adaptations to Agaro are largely in extreme biochemical resistance and extremely fast timing (phenology). The overwhelming portion of the year the land is experiencing an extreme cryogenic dormancy. Plants have developed substances they pump into their tissues during the winter that essentially act as natural antifreezes. As soon as the polar sun finally creates enough melt for the short and intensely brief summer, vegetation is able to bloom rapidly. All flora have a greatly shortened period for reproduction, rushing to sprout, bloom, and release seeds within a few week period before the polar winter returns and locks the land again in frost.

Animals

Tundra Fauna (migratory and plains species)

Animal life in the Agaro Lush Tundra is dictated by hypermobility and the violent pendulum of the subpolar seasons. While distinctively removed from the intensely localized and vertical habitat isolation of the Aer Canyon Pit, Agaro is instead the landscape of great, sweeping migrations; the open plains are teeming with huge, cold-adapted grazing ungulates, hotly pursued by opportunistic scavengers and opportunistic apex predators.

To endure the freezing winds and unstable, boggy terrain, these grazers typically develop highly insulating double-coats and store large reserves of subcutaneous fat; their enormous, widely-splayed hooves double as broad snowshoes across the peat, supporting them over bog and snow. With no physical terrain cover on the endless flat, predators are obligate pursuit hunters: cursorial endurance-runners that use bothpack tactics and a profound ability to track their moving prey across the endless, low-lying lands, wearing it out before catching it.

Wetland Fauna (muskeg and peat-basin species)

The extensive muskeg (peat-bogs) and melt-water basins explode with intense biological activity when the summer thaw ruptures the surface ice and pools up in the hollows of the peatland. The ensuing floods invite in massive populations of migratory, waterfowl-like grazers, and their corresponding insect populations bloom in unimaginable swarms and are fed upon by masses of these semi-aquatic ungulates.

Inhabitants of the flooded peatlands typically possess specialized physical adaptations: their fur is often hydrophobic (water-repellent), their limbs may be partiallywebbed, and their bodies are naturally extremely buoyant, allowing them to maneuver with ease through shallow, boggy water. The shallow peat-basin lakes and marshes are massive, seasonal nurseries for nearly the entirety of Agaro's migratory life, all scrambling to spawn and nest. Beneath the water's surface, huge benthic detritivore communities are consuming all the exploding seasonal organic material, fast breaking it down within the highly acidic peat, before the returning frost can reclaim its hold.

Boreal Ridge Fauna (taiga and refuge species)

Emerging from the flooded bogs in discrete, separate islands and outcrops on the rocky ridges are the pockets of Agaro taiga (boreal forest), each a uniquely localized biome with a distinct community. Immune from the worst of the polar gales, the subarctic woodland contains arboreal climbers,Opportunistic-Opportunistic scavengers and cold-adapted ambush predators of these smaller, insulated woodlands. While the open-plain herds are nomadic migrants to be dispersed by weather and predation,many ridge-dwellers are year-round inhabitants of the forests.

These fauna avoid being crushed and killed by their habitat's cold, extreme environment by caching abundant foods, storing their own fatty reserves, or through exploiting the sub-nivean zone-the gap created by the deep winter snowcover and the frozen earth's ground; this network of air-filled tunnels acts as insulated refuge for these smaller, less mobile creatures during the long winters. These woodlands also function as a key ecological bulwark against the creeping severity of the polar gales; those species unable to quickly out-maneuver the storms must be able to seek refuge within the woody cover and the under-snow environments offered by the taiga on the ridges.

Behavioral Cycles (nomadism and seasonal hyperphagia)

Survival in the Agaro is determined solely by the brutal cycle of freezing and thawing. Long stretches of polar winter forced all species able to tolerate it (but not live within it) to undergo harsh southern migrations, while incapable fauna enter varying states of torpor or true hibernation, suspending their bodily functions within their burrows and nests to survive the months of dark cold. Conversely, upon the melting of its snow and ice-cover the northern lands explode with life.

Driven by seasonal hyperphagia, a voracious and hormonally driven hunger, those migratory herds that traveled south to escape the cold gorge themselves on every emerging bud, leaf, and sprout that pushes through the newly softened earth; birthing is timed almost instantaneously with arrival, and young are capable of maturing with extraordinary speed.

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