Stay Cool with Penguin Poop
It never ceases to amaze and thrill me to learn how interrelated everything is. The latest example I came across is the connection between penguin poop and the weather.
Antarctica is home to huge, crowded colonies of penguins. So you can imagine that the ice is awash in penguin poop. Even if penguins wanted to be tidy with their waste, there are few places there to bury it — mostly there’s just ice and rock. It sounds gross, and reports from researchers who’ve been there say it is pretty awful from a human perspective. But the very thing that makes penguin poop especially stinky — ammonia — also helps moderate the temperature.
The ammonia given off by the poop reacts with sulfur gases in the atmosphere to create airborne particles. These particles form clouds that insulate the ground from sunlight, keeping things cool. The whole process is a bit more complicated than I’ve made it sound, but that’s the gist of a recent paper. Penguin poop makes clouds! I don’t know about you, but that connection would never have occurred to me.
So remember: Just because something is really, really stinky, that doesn’t mean it’s not doing some important work.
’til next time,
Avery