Reindeer are vanishing fast — and not just from the North Pole

Threat level: The global reindeer population has plummeted by roughly 67% in three decades, from roughly 5.5 million to 1.88 million, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association's Arctic Report Card.

• The decline is particularly worrisome to climatologists. Reindeer, also known as caribou, are highly adaptive creatures that survived multiple mass extinctions that wiped out other megafauna like the wooly mammoth and giant ground sloth.
• Reindeer have managed to brave every change in climate since the Ice Age, but the future is not looking good for Santa's helpers, according to a study released earlier this year.

What they're saying: "I was hoping to find that because the species has been living through multiple cycles of climate changes, it wouldn't be affected so much in the future," Elisabetta Canteri, lead researcher in the study, told Axios in a phone interview.

• "But instead, we see this big reduction, these declines in abundance and in range that are greater than what we have seen in the past. So that was very surprising. I wasn't really expecting to see this."

By the numbers: North America could lose up to 80% of our reindeer population by 2100 because the continent will likely shed more suitable habitat than other regions.

• Canteri and her team made that dire estimate from reconstructing 21,000 years of reindeer population data using fossils and DNA.

Threat level: Canteri said that greenhouse gas emissions, development projects and other human activities are major contributors to North America's dwindling reindeer population, although people on the continent are not the sole culprits.

• "Climate is global, right? Whatever people do in one part can affect whatever happens in another part of the world."
• "There's some countries that contribute more to these emissions compared to other countries in the world, obviously. So there is an imbalance in where this comes from, but cause and effect is a bit more complicated."

Zoom in: Sometimes it's not direct human influence causing problems.

• "Rain-on-snow" events, where heavy rainfall traps food under a thick layer of ice, prevent reindeers from digging through the snow to their meals.

Zoom out: For Arctic residents, an abundant reindeer population is a matter of survival, not just a seasonal novelty.

• "You live up here, and buying food is very prohibitive," Eliezer Gurarie, of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, told Axios from the Canadian Arctic.
• "Somebody was just saying today, the choice is a $40 pre-burned steak from the store, you know, or caribou, right? So that's worked for a long time," he said.
• "Caribou has played a central role, but also a cultural, spiritual and identity role. So that's why that makes it all the more really existential that some of these populations have really crashed."

The bottom line: If humans don't take serious steps to cut emissions fast, reindeer might go down in history for good.

Go deeper: Extreme weather chokes off reindeer food supply in Swedish Arctic