If we go back in time to 1957 and tell people that in future Satellites are going to be powerful enough to detect Penguin Poop from space they would look at you as if you were insane. However now due to improvements in the Satellite-mapping technology we now have the capacity to detect & identify Penguin poop from space. At first this might sound ridiculous and you might be asking why would we spend the time and effort to be able to identify poop from space. Basically the problem we are trying to solve is to locate penguin nesting sites to get an idea of how many penguins are there in the wild and how endangered they are currently.
Traditional methods involve going across Antarctica and other places where they nest to find their nesting places. This is very time consuming, expensive and at times dangerous. The first survey folks used sledges etc to travel across, then we moved on to using planes to view the area from the air now we can do it remotely without leaving the comfort of our homes thanks to the advances in technologies. The scientists used images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission and were able to identify Eleven new Colonies of the Emperor penguin.
Satellite-mapping technology that detects stains on the ice from penguin droppings has revealed there are nearly 20% more Emperor colonies than previously identified in fast-warming Antarctica.
“This is an exciting discovery,” said lead author and geographer Peter Fretwell in a statement. “Whilst this is good news, the colonies are small and so only take the overall population count up by 5-10%, to just over half a million penguins.””
The discovery will be used by scientists who are monitoring the birds and raising concerns because they’re particularly vulnerable to sea ice melting from climate change… Scientists warned that most of the newly found colonies are in locations likely to be lost as the climate warms and large sections of seasonal ice — where penguins mate — risk disappearing. “Birds in these sites are therefore probably the ‘canaries in the coal mine’,” said Phil Trathan, head of conservation biology at BAS.
While its great that there are more Emperor Penguins than we thought they are still at risk of extinction due to Global Warming/Climate Change. We need to seriously spend more effort to combat Climate change and the time to make the changes is running out faster than we thought.
Source: Slashdot.org
– Suramya