Monitoring the well-being of Antarctica’s delicate ecosystem just got a little bit easier thanks to a very unlikely source: penguin poop.
By analyzing over 40 years of Antarctic images gathered by seven satellites as part of the Landsat program, a NASA-funded team of researchers recently uncovered new details about the lives of Antarctica’s Adélie penguins — a species that may help reveal past and future threats to one of the most unspoiled regions in the world.
In research presented at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C., on December 11, scientists announced they have pieced together how the Adélie diet has evolved over the past four decades, finding that it surprisingly hasn’t changed very much. Furthermore, the researchers unexpectedly uncovered an enormous, previously unknown population of about 1.5 million penguins located in a particularly remote and harsh region of Antarctica.
