It covered an area roughly comparable to modern Australia.

It had its own climate, its own ecology, its own plant communities, its own characteristic animal life.

This was not a frozen wasteland.

The climate of Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum was cold and dry — considerably drier than the Arctic environments that exist in the same geographic area today — and the dominant vegetation was a type of grassland and shrub-tundra community sometimes called the mammoth steppe.

This community supported enormous populations of large grazing animals: woolly mammoths, horses, bison, reindeer, and other species whose bones are found in abundance in the permafrost deposits of Alaska, Siberia, and the now-submerged floor of the Bering Sea.