You can't make this stuff up.
University of Helsinki researchers spent two months on the Antarctic Peninsula measuring the air around a colony of 60,000 Adélie penguins and found that the fumes of their poop may help cool the Earth.
And they sure do poop a lot:
Published this month in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, the study says the ammonia in penguin poop reacts with sulfuric gas emitted by phytoplankton in the area to form aerosols, which reflect the sun and help cool the planet.
I can't help but imagine the aerosol formation looking exactly like this:
Penguin poop is apparently the lead emitter of this particular aerosol.
Lead author Matthew Boyer said,
There is a deep connection between ecosystem processes - being the ocean phytoplankton activity as well as penguins - and atmospheric processes that can have an impact on the local climate.
In one case, the researchers noticed that the fog bank (their terms) left behind by the penguins lasted for over three hours.
This is how the authors chose to visualize the fog concentration in their report:
Now thanks to science, I have a new expression to throw around at parties:
This stinks of global cooling!
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