The laughable and not-so-laughable effects of penguin poop

When suiting up for the Antarctic, researchers expect the frozen desert to take a toll on their bodies, but perhaps the thing they least expect is for the ambient air to get them high on laughing gas. This is exactly what happened, though, while the team on South Georgia Island was investigating a feedback loop between greenhouse gases and melting glaciers.

There is a lot of evidence that greenhouse gases are contributing to the melting of glaciers, but data seemed to show that these liquefying glaciers caused an increase in greenhouse gases as well. This seemed strange, melting ice doesn’t produce carbon dioxide, so researchers from China and Denmark braved the cold (and… laughing gas?) to investigate the mysterious phenomenon.

Climate change causes habitat loss in all corners of the world, but since the temperature increase is more pronounced near the poles, it’s happening fastest for arctic creatures, literally leaving them on thin ice. The story of the King Penguins on South Georgia Island is the same as the all-too-familiar story of the polar bear in the North. As glaciers retreat towards land, so do the animals. What the researchers had to figure out is why would penguins living on land produce more greenhouse gases than those living on ice. The answer lies, as so many answers do, in their poop.