Back to Home Page
visiting beringia
history and culture
meet your guides
sneak preview
Travel Guide
History and Culture
The Bering Land Bridge is as much a part of America's cultural heritage as Yellowstone or Yosemite, if not more so. map of bering land bridge preserve The distance across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska's Seward Peninsula is approximately 55 miles, and for several periods during the Pleistocene Ice Ages the trip could be made entirely on land instead of water. During additional periods, the passage from Siberia to North America could also have been made by small watercraft moving along coastlines.


Continental Glaciation
Grasping the magnitude of Ice Age glaciation is possible today only on Earth's two extant polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. During the final Ice Age Push, vast ice sheets up to nearly two miles thick burdened much of America. Because the amount of water in Earth's hydrospere is constant, the great ice sheets' hoarding of global waters caused sea levels to fall significantly. As a result, land masses grew dramatically where continental shelves slope gradually, as they do in the Bering Strait.


During the time of the Bering Land Bridge, a sea level drop of approximately 300 feet during the Wisconsinan glacial period revealed a relatively flat, low-lying stretch of continental plain linking North America to Asia.


Sea level now rises an average of one foot per century because global warming is melting the great polar ice masses of the Arctic and Antarctic. The greenhouse effect and loss of stratospheric ozone may have increased the rate of global warming recently. Many clues to this intriguing puzzle about how and when humans first peopled the Americas undoubtedly lie underwater now.

Peopling the Americas

  • The First Americans



  • Marine Mammals
    When Asia and Alaska were joined, marine mammals could not travel between the Bering and Chukchi seas. Neither could they range between the Atlantic and Pacific via arctic waters. Various seals, bowhead whales, walrus, and beluga whales were historically important to Inupiat Eskimos of the Seward Peninsula, and today they remain so for subsistence lifeways.

    Walrus are a food mainstay for residents of the Diomedes and St. Lawrence Island. Polar bears may range the park and often ride ice floes through the Canadian Arctic to the Bering Strait. Marine mammals, still of immense importance along the Bering Strait, are not often sighted along the coast.

  • Terrestrial Mammals
    The Bering Land Bridge also served as a crossing point for animals other than humans during the Pleistocene. Making the journey with their hunters were muskox, lemmings, and some of the big Pleistocene animals, including mammoths.



arctic home | travel guide | ticket holder | teacher notes
explorations | order