Satellite images of penguin poop lead scientists to ‘exciting discovery’ - Digital Trends

In the ever-advancing tract of planetary science, you mightiness deliberation that discovering carnal poop successful outer imagery would beryllium of small consequence.

But for a probe squad studying Antarctica, making specified a find led to what it described arsenic “an breathtaking discovery.”

Perhaps we’d amended explain.

After poring implicit images from the European Commission’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 outer ngo and besides the Maxar WorldView-3 satellite, scientists were precocious capable to corroborate the beingness of a caller emperor penguin colony comprising astir 500 birds.

The scientists were capable to place the colony from the birds’ guano stains, which are brownish successful colour and truthful comparatively casual to spot against the crystal and rock, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) explained successful a report.

The emperor penguin is the tallest and heaviest of each surviving penguin types, and past twelvemonth was declared a threatened taxon by the U.S. authorities owed to the effects of the changing climate.

The representation beneath is from the Maxar outer and shows the determination of the recently discovered colony astatine Verleger Point successful West Antarctica.

Aerial imagery from the the Maxar WorldView-3 outer shows the recently discovered emperor penguin colony astatine Verleger Point. Maxar Technologies

This latest find means that scientists present person information connected 66 emperor penguin colonies on the Antarctica coastline, with fractional of these discovered via outer imagery.

“This is an breathtaking discovery,” said Dr. Peter Fretwell, who studies wildlife from abstraction astatine BAS. “The caller outer images of Antarctica’s coastline person enabled america to find galore caller colonies. And whilst this is bully news, similar galore of the precocious discovered sites, this colony is tiny and successful a portion severely affected by caller oversea crystal loss.”

The BAS said that according to existent projections for clime change, the penguins’ earthy oversea crystal situation volition beryllium hard hit, starring to 80% of these colonies becoming quasi-extinct by the extremity of the century.

BAS besides noted however emperor colonies successful the country are hard to survey due to the fact that they often beryllium successful distant and inaccessible locations. The conditions astatine these sites often spot temperatures dropping to arsenic debased arsenic −76 degrees fahrenheit (−60 degrees Celsius). It’s these factors that prompted BAS to commencement utilizing outer imagery 15 years ago, with scientists keeping their eyes peeled for guano stains connected the ice.

Several years ago, conservationists besides started utilizing Maxar’s almighty outer to gather information connected different endangered species.