Earth Month – Day 12
Penguin’s nature call.
It turns out a certain kind of poop can help track Antarctic glaciers.
Penguin poop is proving to be beneficial to scientists and the earth. Sandra Tsing Loh talks about this in her blog, the Loh Down on Science.
Poop can help track the historic advance and retreat of Antarctic glaciers.
Adelie penguins nest only in rocky coastal colonies, away from ice. So plotting the location of ancient penguin droppings reveals the non-whereabouts of ancient glaciers. Marine ornithologist Steve Emslie of the University of North Carolina dug through over forty-five thousand years’ worth of tarry black penguin guano.
It had been perfectly preserved in Antarctica’s frigid climate.
When the carbon-dated the guano, Emslie found that forty-three to twenty-seven thousand years ago, much of the Ross Sea was open ocean. Then, the ice sheet began to advance. It did not retreat again until about thirteen thousand years ago, when the last ice age ended.
Emslie’s penguin research offers geologists their first long-term understanding of the movement of Antarctica’s ice sheet–and the promise of better models for climate prediction in the future.
Never mind that that the preserved excrement also contained eggshells, feathers, bones, and even penguin mummies. Talk about ‘Happy Feet: The Dark Side.’ Overall, it’s a cheerful story!
Sandra Tsing Loh is a comedian, author, and KPCC Radio Commentator. You can check her blog here.
Leave a Reply