stink

This story begins having coffee at the Ateneo de Lugo and browsing the Progreso; continue with an interview with Iker Trigo, a CSIC technician from Lugo who has spent an Antarctic campaign, confessing that “he never imagined that penguins smelled bad”; and ends with one of the most counterintuitive scientific findings about the south pole of the last few months. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What do we know about penguins? Everyone knows what a penguin: a bird around one meter high and five kilos in weight. Wings that look like fins, webbed feet and a very characteristic black-and-white coat. Clumsy on land, very fast at sea and absolutely useless in the air. Plus, they are very cute. Or so the popular image of penguins tells us. But penguins keep secrets. What concerns us today, of course, is that penguins are one of its main stink factories of the entire Antarctic region. They smell bad, very bad. Although, yes, it is true: we cannot call it “a secret” in the strict sense either. Anyway, anyone assumes that tens of thousands of birds eating krill are going to smell really bad. It is not for nothing that guano stains are so visible that Sentinel-2 satellites use them to census emperor penguin colonies from space. The discovery of these months is that the ammonia contained in these enormous amounts of guano are the main terrestrial source of “cloud-forming particles.” That is, the same chemical compounds that make penguins stink play a key role in regulating the clouds that regulate the continent’s temperature. And this? During the southern summer of 2023, a team from Hensilki University was installed at the Argentine base of Marambio to measure the concentrations of ammonia, sulfuric acid, iodic acid or dimethylamine in the environment. Their conclusions are that ammonia concentrations were closely related to penguin colonies. What’s more, the data indicate that this ammonia (joined to sulfuric acid from phytoplankton) creates aerosols that act as cloud condensation nuclei. It is true that the work has limitations and focuses fundamentally on the southern summer: but the data are surprising and reconfigure many of the things we thought we knew about Antarctic atmospheric dynamics. Everything is related. And it is curious that we have not realized this until now: after all, there are 40 million individuals at the south pole generating condensation nuclei. But it shows everything we have left to know. Image | Martin Wettstein In Xataka | 450 years ago someone toured Spain writing down all its animals and plants: the bizarre atlas of what no longer exists