The Nature Climate Feedback blog reports of a talk given at this year’s American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco on evidence of significant warming of the Antarctic in the last 50 years.

In 2000/2001, I spent two months at Palmer Station, the smallest US research base on the Antarctic Peninsula. I was there doing work for my PhD project on benthic foraminifera, going out in a small boat every other day to take sediment samples with a small grab on a hand-operated winch (boy, was I buff then).

A nice break in my routine, I got particularly lucky one day and got to go out to Dream Island with the bird researcher Bill Fraser. The small island is a couple of hours by small boat from Palmer Station, and when the weather allows, Bill and his team go there to do a census of the penguin colonies.

I am actually not particularly fond of penguins. They’re cute on pictures – usually fresh out of the water from a foraging trip, all nice and shiny – but when you get really close to a colony, you realize quickly that they’re really loud and smelly birds. I mean: smelly. In fact, the trip to Dream Island was one of the two times in my life that I actually fainted – ok, so the primary reason was that I just hadn’t eaten enough and was getting cold, but the trigger was the overpowering smell from the penguin poop Bill and his team were scooping up to analyze for prey remains like fish otoliths and squid beaks. (I had them and myself worried quite a bit, but managed not to hit my head on the sharp rocks the ground was covered with when going down and was up and going again relatively quickly – phew).

I was sharing a room that season with my friend Meredith Hooper, who wrote a book about Bill’s research which is worth reading. In the book, The ferocious summer, she tells the story of the warming on the Antarctic Peninsula from a ‘behind the scenes’ angle, portraying support staff and researchers and their various jobs and projects on station (no, I wasn’t the first to have the idea by a long shot).

The thing is: during that season eight years ago, it was remarkable and new and strange that, in the middle of a huge colony of Adélie penguins, you’d find one or two – rarely more – pairs of gentoo or chinstrap penguins. They had just started sneaking in between the Adélies. The Adélies like it cooler and need bare rocks for their nests – their eggs get cold in the snow. Gentoos and chinstraps are ok with warmer temperatures, and deal with snow better. (To avoid confusion: precipitation in the Antarctic used to be lower. It only snows when it’s warmer, i.e. snow melts and water evaporates, which then turns into snow again. Otherwise, old snow just blows around.)

Apart from the odd pair in the Adélie colonies, you’d only come across the occasional gentoo hanging out in the ‘backyard’ behind Palmer Station (behind station and glacier), where they were hoping for some privacy to moult – only to be interrupted by weirdos like myself traipsing out to the back to spend the night in a tent next to Arthur Harbor, listening to the glacier calving huge chunks of ice and the wind rattling the tent… rather than sleeping on station in a comfy bed.

Guess what: four years later, I was at Palmer Station again. And there were gentoos everywhere. The Antarctic Peninsula is indeed one of the areas in the world where a pronounced warming trend is just plain visible – no science background needed.

Adélie penguins, really hating the snow.
Courtesy Donna Patterson-Fraser