Penguins in Antarctica could actually be helping cool the climate. New research shows they can influence how clouds form thanks to all their waste.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
A lot of things affect our climate, including things like penguin poop. Lauren Sommer, from NPR’s Climate Desk, reports on a new study about how penguins could be helping to cool the planet.
LAUREN SOMMER, BYLINE: At the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, there’s a colony of 60,000 Adelie penguins.
MATTHEW BOYER: When you approach it, you’re not really ready to see the scale of the actual number of birds, but you can smell it from a long way away.
SOMMER: That’s Matthew Boyer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Helsinki, who was there studying them. It smells because a lot of penguins means a lot of poop.
BOYER: It smells a bit like rotten fish mixed with pigeon poop. It doesn’t smell good (laughter). They don’t smell great.
SOMMER: One day, when the wind shifted their way, Boyer and his colleagues noticed a thick fog was forming. Over weeks, they were able to measure how all that penguin waste seemed to be causing that, which could be happening all over Antarctica. They published the findings in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. Here’s how it works. Penguin waste gives off ammonia gas, which goes into the air and runs into other gases.
BOYER: When they hit each other and they interact, they stick and these clusters of molecules end up growing.
SOMMER: Those particles become the seeds for clouds because they attract water vapor. Clouds can’t actually form without particles, and clouds affect how warm our climate is.
BOYER: Clouds are important for climate because they’re bright and they’re white and they’re in the sky.
SOMMER: They act like giant reflectors, blocking sunlight that would heat up the Earth. That means in the Antarctic, clouds that penguins help form could be cooling the atmosphere. Boyer says more research needs to be done because in some cases, clouds can also act like a blanket, trapping heat. It’s important in the bigger picture of how the climate is changing.
BOYER: The Antarctic environment and changes to the Antarctic environment has a global impact.
SOMMER: The poles are warming faster than the rest of the planet, and their melting glaciers are causing sea levels to rise, which could affect millions of people. So penguin waste could actually matter to coastal communities around the world.
BOYER: It’s quite interesting how such a small thing that you would never necessarily think about can have an impact on something else that’s much bigger than itself.
SOMMER: Other research has shown how seabirds in the Arctic could also be cooling the atmosphere. Jeff Pierce is a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who worked on that study. He says the main reason seabirds could have an impact there is there isn’t a lot of other source material for clouds, like dust or pollution.
JEFF PIERCE: There aren’t a lot of existing particles in the Arctic. It’s pretty clean. And small things, small details in these regions, such as the ammonia that comes off poop, can make a difference in the number of particles.
SOMMER: Pierce says there’s a lot more to understand about this process. The challenge is that in a warming climate, it’s changing as fast as they can study it.
Lauren Sommer, NPR News.
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