Shrinking glaciers leading to increase in population of Adelie penguins

Researchers of University of Tasmania in Australia have discovered that shrinking glaciers are leading to the birth of more Adelie penguins in the East Antarctica region. As per their findings, in the last 14,000 years, the population of Adelie penguins has increased nearly 135-fold because, additional breeding sites have become exposed due to the retreating glaciers.
This has been reported in zeenews.com dated 18 November 2015.

It can be assumed that this population explosion can be attributed to current environmental conditions are more favorable for Adelie penguins than they were when compared to the last ice age.
Shrinking glaciers could be a key driver of population change over millennia for Adelie penguins in East Antarctica. While studying the response of thee bids to past climate change it would be possible to predict how well Adelie penguins will respond in the future.
Till now, research had concentrated on short-term changes in terms of years or decades, but the climate change that is happening right now is likely to have effects over thousands of years.
East Antarctica is, at present, home to 30 percent of the global population of Adelie penguins, with an estimated abundance of 1.14 million breeding pairs.

(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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Worries for Pacific countries like New Zealand from combined effects of El Nino and La Nina

The combined effects of El Nino and La Nina could wreak havoc on Pacific countries like New Zealand as revealed by International researchers from 13 institutions, including Waikato University. Their conclusion is based on data collected from 48 beaches across three continents and five countries recorded between 1979 and 2012.
This has been reported in nzherald.co.nz dated 22 September 2015.

As per their findings, bigger waves and more coastal erosion will hit the Pacific countries like New Zealand because the severe El Nino and La Nina events would lead to an increase in storm events. The research strengthens the understanding of the impacts of the climate-driven La Nina and El Nino systems.
These have not been factored into studies on future coastal vulnerability that focused mainly on sea level rise. It may be recalled that when the west coast of the US mainland and Canada, Hawaii, and northern Japan felt the coastal impacts of El Nino, namely, bigger waves, different wave direction, higher water levels and erosion. However, New Zealand and Australia had experienced 'suppression' like smaller waves and less erosion and, things could be different now.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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Study reveals - global warming led to extinction of the Ice Age wooly mammoths

A study conducted by the University of Adelaide in Australia has concluded that it was global warming that led to the extinction of the wooly mammoths of the Ice Age - the mighty megafauna of the last Ice Age that included the woolly mammoths became extinct due to rapid climate-warming events.
This has been reported in zeenews.india.com dated 27 July 2015.

The study has found that during the unstable climate of the Late Pleistocene (about 60,000 to 12,000 years ago) there were sudden climate spikes called interstadials and these resulted in increased temperatures between four and 16 degrees Celsius within decades.
Survival was not easy for the large size animals like the woolly mammoths in these hot conditions because of the effects it had on their habitats and prey. As explained by one of the authors of the study - interstadials lead to dramatic shifts in global rainfall and vegetation patterns. The rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the consequential warming effects can have a similar rate of change and could herald in another major phase of large mammal extinctions.
In the opinion of another paleogenetics of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark is that this study can be considered as a wake-up call.
(Image courtesy wikimediacommons.org)

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