Pegguin POO helps keep the Antarctic cool

Steam of ammonia, which rises from piles with droppings in Antarctica’s crowded penguin colonies, helps increase the formation of clouds that have a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight away from the surface.

“This demonstrates a deep connection between the ecosystem and atmospheric processes,” says Matthew Boyer at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

The link comes to the way ammonia affects the number of lots in the atmosphere. To form a cloud, water vapor must condense around a significant batch of some kind. But it is difficult to get by in Antarctic’s cold, clean air.

Without much dust, vegetation or air pollution around, most of the available particles for a will-be cloud cluster of sulfuric acid molecules generated as a result of natural emissions from phytoplankton in waters surround the continent. High concentrations of ammonia were already Nown to accelerate the formation of these clusters a thousand times. But where would ammonia come from Antarctica? Penguin droppings must be a rich source.

To control this, Boyer and his colleagues measured concentrations of ammonia, sulfuric acid and larger batch in the air several kilometers of wind of a 60,000-strong colony of Adélie Penguins (Pygoscelis Adeliae) On the Antarctic -Peninsula. “Fearly they smell,” says Boyer. “The dirty birds.”

As the wind blew from the colony of the colony, they found that ammonia concentrations increased far, the levels found in air arriving from other directions. This increase in ammonia also increased the formation of the party of sulfuric acid, which is large enough for water to condense around them and presumably for forms. This effect was on the weekends after the penguins had moved on from the colony.

Several clouds, especially over the sea, would have a cooling effect by reflecting sunlight away from the earth’s surface. Boyer says this also means that a decrease in penguin stocks – for example, due to loss of sea ice driven by climate change – could have a heating effect across Antarctica by reducing cloud covering. However, the measurements made in the current work are not enough to estimate the size of the effect.

Other research suggests it could be meaningful. E.g. Found Jeffrey Pierce at Colorado State University and Hans Colleugue’s ammonia from Puffin excretions in the Arctic similarly increased cloud cover in the summer. They estimated this result in a cooling effect that canceled as much as a third of the heating due to carbon dioxide in the air throughout the region. “I’m sure it had some influence,” says Pierce.