Starvation killed 80,000 reindeer after unusual Arctic rains cut off the animals' food supply

In August, a lightning blast claimed the lives of more than 300 reindeer in Norway. The month before, an anthrax epidemic - which Russian officials blamed on microbes that thawed after spending decades frozen inside a reindeer corpse - sickened several indigenous people in Siberia. Anthrax killed a 12-year-old boy, and reindeer died by the hundreds. In the disease's aftermath, the regional government proposed to terminate 250,000 reindeer by Christmas.
Even the Arctic tundra has turned against the animals, so well-adapted to the clime, as the area warms at a faster rate than the rest of the globe.
In November 2013, 61,000 reindeer starved to death on Russia's Yamal Peninsula. It marked the largest regional "mortality episode" of reindeer ever recorded, as ecologists wrote in a new study in the journal Biology Letters. An additional 20,000 had succumbed to famine in November 2006. The immediate cause, according to the team of researchers from Europe, the United States and Asia, was an unusual ice barrier that smothered the reindeer pastures. This Starved 80,000 reindeer to death.