On a dry, wind-blowing cap to the south Antarctica, The ground is decorated with the dead, mummified Penguin. The rocks around them are littered with bones, pebbles and guinea fowl – the so-called traces of the newly abandoned Adoli Penguin Colony.
Scenes like this are common around the Ross Sea in Antarctica, home to millions of adeles and other affluent penguin populations. However, the sight of Cape Erizar astonished biologist Steve Emsley, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, when he visited in January 2016; He knew that the Adoli penguin had not been present there for hundreds of years. Where did the remains of this haunted colony suddenly come from?
Now, in a study published September 18 in the journal Geology, Emsley provides the answer. Radiocarbon analysis of bone, eggshells and mummified skin samples collected at the site showed that most of the fresh penguins that live in Cape Irizar are actually hundreds to thousands of years old. According to Emsley, the site has been occupied by the breeding of penguin colonies for the past 5,000 years, but passive evidence of those occupations has only come to light due to the rapidly increasing snowfall during Antarctica. Always a hot summer.
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“I’ve been working in the Antarctic for so many years, I’ve never seen a site like this before,” Emsley told LiveScience. “Mummies will not be able to survive on the surface in this windy area unless they are just exposed.”
The past is melting
Antarctica – and especially the Antarctic Peninsula, at the northern tip of the continent – is one of the fastest growing regions Earth. When Emsley visited King George Island, north of the peninsula, 10 years ago, he was amazed by the melted melt.
“Millions and millions of gallons of fresh water flow into the ocean every day from just one ice cap,” Emsley said. “Sad to see what’s going on there.”
Cape Irizar, in the deepest part of South Antarctica, is separated from the frigid Ross Sea. And, the average temperature there is very cold, Emsley said global warming The region has been less severe. Over the past decade, however, “streamlets” of melted water have begun to flow from nearby glaciers, removing ice cover and exposing rocky ground beneath, Emsley said.
Emsley writes in his study that the recent meltdown has brought out the long-lost લીdly penguin structures. During his 2016 trip to the Cape, he saw many Mummified The penguin chicks – equipped with dry air and preserved – are sitting upright on the ground at Cape Irizar. Emsley said mummies like these are a common sight at structure locations in the area, but they can’t last long in windy winds before they break down. The mummies at Cape Irizar looked fresh, like the guano stains (penguin puppies) scattered around. Nearby, a large collection of pebbles formed a mound – the behavior of a common adoli nest.
“The fresh fossils on the surface looked like a modern colony. But in historic times no penguin breeding has been recorded there,” Emsley said.
On a subsequent voyage, Amsley and his companions dug up the throats of those three new pebbles, in which dozens of chicken bones and other remains were found. Researchers determined the age of these structures by analyzing the isotope, or version, radioactive decay. Carbon Within seven of those bones, in addition, a handful of eggshells, feathers and skin specimens
That radiocarbon dating confirmed Emsley’s expectation: 800 to 5,000 years old, mostly fresh penguin fossils were ancient. The specimens showed evidence of at least three different penguin “occupations” at the Cape Irizar site, the final part of which was completed about a thousand years ago.
“The latest business was on the surface,” Emsley said. The remains of this colony were “covered with snow and ice” beginning about 800 years ago during the Little Ice Age, eventually being uncovered by the melting of summer.
‘Winners and losers’
According to Emsley, nearby “fast ice” – or slabs of sea ice attached to land – melted in early summer, reaching the Cape during the Adoli breeding season, past penguin businesses were associated with warmer periods. The penguins could easily swim up to the cape and build nests on the beach, Emsley said.
Today, the rapid snow around Cape Irizar melts too late in the season to make the area a viable nesting spot. But that will probably change in the near future, Emsley said. As the snow melts faster at the beginning of each year in response to global warming, the penguins will have more and more time to colonize the cape and begin their breeding cycle. That’s a good thing for the Adoli penguins of South Antarctica; – But their northern cousins, who are rapidly losing their sea-ice habitats, are not renting so well.
“We’ll talk about climate change ‘winners and losers,'” Emsley said, referring to species that will either increase their populations. Climate change (Winners) or push towards extinction (losers). “Both penguins have a special place to be. While we see them declining in the Antarctic Peninsula, they have expanded or stabilized in the East Antarctica and the Ross Sea.”
The discovery of these ancient settlements is a reminder that penguins have been roaming around Antarctica for millennia, Emsley said, migrating from Cape to Cape as sea ice fills and flows. But now their habitat is changing faster than ever before.
As warming intensifies, millions of penguins live on the North Antarctic Peninsula May disappear That said, in the next 20 years, and Cape Irizar could once again become a major penguin asset. Digging deeper into the cape and studying more remains of ancient settlements that once lived there may give a better clue as to what was in store for Adele’s.
Published on Original Living Science.
