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Melting Ice Reveals Mummified Penguins in Antarctica - The New York Times

Melting Ice Reveals Mummified Penguins in Antarctica - The New York Times

Melting Ice Reveals Mummified Penguins in Antarctica - The New York Times
Sep 30, 2020 1 min, 16 secs

In January 2016, Steven Emslie was finishing a season of studying penguin colonies living near Zucchelli Station, an Italian base in Antarctica.

He had heard rumors of penguin guano on a rocky cape along the Scott Coast but knew of no active colonies there.

While pebbles are an everyday find on other continents, it is rare to spot them in abundance on dry land in Antarctica.

A key exception is found in Adélie penguin colonies, as the birds collect the small stones from the beaches to build their nests.

The pebbles had been gathered together into nests and recently been dispersed a bit by the weather.

Emslie immediately realized that the guano, feathers, bones and pebbles had all been locked in place under layers of ice for centuries and that the “freshly dead” penguins were in fact recently defrosted mummies that had been swallowed by advancing snow fields long ago.

The find paints a picture of a site that, after experiencing periodic Adélie penguin occupation over thousands of years, saw that occupation come to an abrupt end approximately 800 years ago.

“They need pebbles for their nests, so they are going to find all the pebbles that are already on the land at this site very attractive,” he said.

“We always thought Adélie penguins carried a strong impulse to return to the nesting sites they were born at year after year but, as several catastrophic ice collapses have shown us recently, they are actually pretty adaptable,” said David Ainley, a penguin ecologist at H.T

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