As the world warms, melting ice sheets around the world reveal everything from trapped methane gas to the remains of Viking.
A new discovery has been made in the now-returning Snow Packs: the remains of an 800-year-old penguin.
After discovering that the Antarctic coast was initially found to be fresh in Cape Irizar, researchers were surprised to learn that carbon-dating placed a corpse at least 800 years old.
The team says some of the least preserved are about 5,000 years old.
Penguin left. (Steven Emsley)
The site was identified by the pebble mounds used to build the original penguin structures, with penguin chic bones scattered on the surface. That doesn’t make sense – there are no records of penguin settlements in the area since records began in the early 1900s.
After further excavations and the recovery of penguin bones, feathers and eggshells, subsequent analysis revealed that this was in fact a long-abandoned penguin habitat.
“Overall, our sample retrieves an old mix and the current penguin represents a long period of occupation and abandonment of this cape over thousands of years,” says Steven Emsley, a marine biologist behind Wilmington University in North Carolina. .
“All year long I do this research in Antarctica, I’ve never seen a place like this.”
The penguins may have moved from place to place due to increased snow cover or other atmospheric shifts, but with more snowfall the fossils were preserved and stabilized – kept almost in fresh condition until Emsley and his colleagues were on them.
With average annual temperatures of 1.5 and 2 િય C rising in this part of the continent since the 1980s, trapped fossils have now emerged and decomposed as normal.
Penguin bones. (Steven Emsley)
Says Emsley, “This latest snowmelt reveals the long-preserved fossils that were frozen and buried until then. Got there. “
Emsley suggests that the so-called ‘fast ice’ that spreads inland from the ocean may have begun to form as soon as it cools down, which remains awkward for penguins for most of the year. Now with the melting of a large part of the ice the opposite effect is going on.
The current climate change on our planet is not only revealing the remains of long-dead animals, it will also bring some living things back to life. Unfortunately, on balance, we are on the verge of losing many more varieties than we gained.
Speaking of Cape Irizar, researchers believe that after a gap of centuries, the long history of hosting penguins is about to enter a new chapter.
“[Penguins] They need pebbles for their beads, so they are very attractive to find pebbles that have already come to this place, “said Emsley New York Times. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see them make this place their home again in the near future.”
Research has been published in Geology.
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