Authorities in Chile are investigating what caused the death of nearly 15 hundred penguins found in a southern bay.The dead birds were discovered yesterday on a beach more than 12 hundred miles north of Antarctica.Navy officials say experts from nearby Austral University are working to determine what killed the penguins.They did not know immediately where the penguins were from and sayIt's not unusual for some penguin species to migrate thousands of miles. (But it is unusual for 1500 to die trying.)
...The journal Science on Thursday published findings by Martin Montes-Hugo and Oscar Schofield that offer an explanation for the southern shift of Antarctic coastal species as the Western Antarctic Peninsula gets warmer -- at a rate scientists say is one of the fastest observed anywhere. Adelie penguins have been moving their range southward for years, leaving their old niches to species like gentoo and chinstrap penguins that are more adaptable to milder conditions, Schofield says....
acquired January 27, 2009
The Moderate Resolution Imaging (click here) Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this composite image on January 27, 2009. Few features are visible on the ice-covered landscape. The surface appears rough where the Transantarctic Mountains curve in a shallow “s” from the shore of the Ross Sea to the Ronne Ice Shelf. The Polar Plateau in the center of the continent is smooth, shaded only by the faint shadow cast by clouds. The Weddell Sea is textured with chunks of sea ice.
This image (click here), based on the analysis of weather station and satellite data, shows the continent-wide warming trend from 1957 through 2006. Dark red over West Antarctica reflects that the region warmed most per decade. Most of the rest of the continent is orange, indicating a smaller warming trend, or white, where no change was observed. The underlying land surface color is based on the Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica (LIMA) data set, while the topography is from a Radarsat-based digital elevation model. Sea ice extent in the Southern Ocean surrounding the continent is based on data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) collected on May 14, 2008 (late fall in the Southern Hemisphere).
