Ranger Rani is shivering.
May be it was because she is excited with a discovery. May be it was because she just came back from the icy desert called Antarctica.
Ranger Rani does have some warm news. The global warming and climate change, of course, have something to do with it.
Antarctica has 5.5 million square miles of ice sheet. For many millions of years, the size of the sheet has shrunk or grown depending upon the warmness and coolness of the earth's atmosphere. Scientists studying how the ice moves are at a loss. How do they know where the markers are when it freezes and melts frequently?
Then, scientists stumbled upon a perfect solution. Adélie penguins, in this case provided the answer.
There are 17 species of penguins living in Antarctica. Only four of these breed in the cold conditions of the Antarctica. Being truly flightless, penguin spends 75% of their life at sea. They all breed on land or sea-ice attached to the land. Ranger Rani thinks you all know this.
The Adélie penguins return to the same nesting site year after year. They leave lot of trash behind. The bones, tissues, feces, eggshells, and feathers they leave behind are all treasures for the scientists. And they couldn't have asked for better preservation. The frigid temperatures of the Antarctica act like a freezer where samples are kept intact.
Using the debris, scientists charted the ancient penguin colonies' population shifts with climate change. To this data, they added the extent of the sea-ice to date the ice movement.
How can Adélie penguins help scientists map the ice?
Biology of Adélie penguins provides the answer.
