A recent study publish in the journalGeologydetails the surprising discovery of a colony of ancientAdélie penguins , preserved in remarkable condition thanks to the region ’s climate . Some of the corpse were in such respectable nick that they seem fresh to chair research worker Steven Emslie , a confounding finding given there are no records of an extant penguin colony at Cape Irizar since the first IE ( includingRobert Falcon Scott ) came to the Ross Sea in 1901 - 1903 .
Among the remains was a oversupply of penguin chick bones , which were scattered among guano stains left by the droppings of penguin at some point in the Cape ’s history . Emslie and his squad even came across some terminated chick carcase still with feathers fall away and others complete mama . complicate by the inconsistency of their finding with the Cape ’s record , they collected samples for carbon 14 date to try and make sense of what they were looking at .
The analyses reveal that Cape Irizar had played host to breeding penguins on at least three occasion , with the last one ending around 800 old age ago . It ’s possible this occupation came to an end as a result of increase snowfall as it was at around this time the Little Ice Age was kicking in . The " fresh " corpse found by Emslie ’s team were in all probability sink in snow when they conk and uphold intact until recent snowmelt revealed them once more on the control surface .
Snowmelt is being seen across the region as global warming has push the annual temperature of the Ross Sea up by around 1.5 – 2.0 ° C ( 34.7 – 35.6 ° farad ) since the 1980s . The effects have been note via planet imagery , express more and more of the cape emerge from beneath its icy binding .
“ Overall , our sample recovered a potpourri of old and what appear to be recent penguin remains incriminate multiple periods of business and desertion of this mantle over thousands of eld , ” explained Emslie in astatement . “ In all the years I have been doing this inquiry in Antarctica , I ’ve never seen a site quite like this . "
" This late snowmelt revealing long - keep corpse that were freeze and buried until now is the adept account for the jumble of penguin remains of unlike age that we found there . "
