Beringia

Beringia is a loosely defined region surrounding the Bering Strait, the Chukchi Sea, and the Bering Sea. It includes parts of Chukotka and Kamchatka in Russia as well as Alaska in the United States. In historical contexts it also includes the Bering land bridge, an ancient land bridge roughly 1,000 miles (1,600 km) wide (north to south) at its greatest extent, which connected Asia with North America at various times — all lying atop the existing North American plate, and east of the Siberian Chersky Range — during the Pleistocene ice ages.

The term Beringia was coined by the Swedish botanist Eric Hultén in 1937. During the ice ages, Beringia, like most of Siberia and all of north and northeast China, was not glaciated because snowfall was very light. It was a grassland steppe, including the land bridge, that stretched for several hundred miles into the continents on either side. It is believed that a small human population of at most a few thousand survived the Last Glacial Maximum in Beringia, isolated from its ancestor populations in Asia for at least 5,000 years, before expanding to populate the Americas sometime after 16,500 years ago, during the Late Glacial Maximum as the American glaciers blocking the way southward melted.

Prior to European colonization Beringia was inhabited by the Yupik peoples on both sides of the straits. This culture remains in the region today along with others. In 2012, the governments of Russia and the United States announced a plan to formally establish "a transboundary area of shared Beringian heritage". Among other things this agreement would establish close ties between the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve and the Cape Krusenstern National Monument in the United States and the planned Beringia National Park in Russia.

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