Current Event

Antarctica warms, which threatens penguins

Do you like penguins? If you do then I have a bad news for you. In Antarctica the temperature is going up, and that’s not good for penguins. Scientists these times they are studying the climate because it changes too often there. But, at the South Pole and Lake Vostok it’s getting colder and not getting warmer. A group of scientist looked more into the data where they found this information, some of the data went back 50 years, so they decided to estimate of temperature and make a new data table the new data table showed that West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been warming. This place takes up about one-quarter of the whole continent. West Antarctica is warming about 0.17 degrees Celsius per decade. East Antarctica had cooled slightly between 1957 and 2006 but now it’s warming up. Drew Shindell said “The new results … indicate that there’s warming related to greenhouse gases on all seven of Earth’s continents” Melting ice can easily make disaster for the continent’s wildlife. A data of gathered at a penguin rookery showed that when sea ice was average of 11% the penguin population was really bad. At that time the penguin population was half of the normal. Even if the melting slows the population will be the same. Other research showed that Terra Adélie can only host 400 breeding pairs by the end of the century. Forty years ago there was a big different, it was 15 times as now.

Bibliography: http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20090204/Note3.asp

Picture: http://www.earthshots.org/photos/499.jpg