{"id":1126,"date":"2017-04-11T16:38:09","date_gmt":"2017-04-11T15:38:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/?p=1126"},"modified":"2019-02-08T15:55:04","modified_gmt":"2019-02-08T15:55:04","slug":"volcanic-eruptions-influence-the-health-of-penguin-colonies-in-antarctica","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/volcanic-eruptions-influence-the-health-of-penguin-colonies-in-antarctica\/","title":{"rendered":"Volcanic eruptions influence the health of penguin colonies in Antarctica"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/ncomms14914\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study<\/a> published in the journal Nature Communications seeks to answer that question using an unintentional chronicle of one colony\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history\u00e2\u20ac\u201dspecifically, penguin droppings in Antarctic lake sediments. Like other animals, penguins excrete certain elements (copper, zinc, strontium, selenium) in proportions much higher than what is found in the surrounding environment. As a result, their guano, even if it is quite old, remains identifiably bird-made. The new study centers on Ardley Island, part of the South Shetland chain, which is home to a gentoo colony that, for millennia, has been contributing its guano to the local lake. Like a trove of dusty old letters stashed in an attic, the mucky detritus, known by the Swedish word gyttja (pronounced \u00e2\u20ac\u0153yittya\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), represents a rich archive of daily life in the past. By combining chemical analyses of this sediment with an estimate of the average gentoo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s guano \u00e2\u20ac\u0153productivity,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the researchers were able to determine Ardley Island\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s historic penguin occupancy with censuslike precision. Next, they compared the gyttja with ice and sea-sediment cores from adjacent areas\u00e2\u20ac\u201dsome of the most reliable records of climate change. The results were surprising\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/tech\/elements\/a-tale-of-cataclysm-written-in-penguin-guano?mbid=rss\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">read more<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A study published in the journal Nature Communications seeks to answer that question using an unintentional chronicle of one colony\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history\u00e2\u20ac\u201dspecifically, penguin droppings in Antarctic lake sediments. Like other animals, penguins excrete certain elements (copper, zinc, strontium, selenium) in proportions much higher than what is found in the surrounding environment. As a result, their guano, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/volcanic-eruptions-influence-the-health-of-penguin-colonies-in-antarctica\/\" class=\"more-link\">Read more<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Volcanic eruptions influence the health of penguin colonies in Antarctica&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-1126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1126"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.northumbria.ac.uk\/coldandpalaeo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}