Visitor “Scale and Context” by David Middleton
If World Warming Is Unhealthy for Penguins, Why Had been There Big Penguins Throughout the Paleocene?
FEBRUARY 9, 2023
Fossil bones from the most important penguin that ever lived unearthed in New Zealand
by Sarah Collins, College of CambridgeFossil bones from two newly described penguin species, one in all them considered the most important penguin to ever reside—weighing greater than 150 kilograms, greater than thrice the dimensions of the most important dwelling penguins—have been unearthed in New Zealand.
A world group, together with researchers from the College of Cambridge, reported the invention within the Journal of Paleontology. The paper’s senior writer, Alan Tennyson from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, found the fossils in 57 million-year-old seashore boulders in North Otago, on New Zealand’s South Island, between 2016 and 2017.
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“Fossils present us with proof of the historical past of life, and generally that proof is really stunning,” mentioned co-author Dr. Daniel Discipline from Cambridge’s Division of Earth Sciences. “Many early fossil penguins attained monumental sizes, simply dwarfing the most important penguins alive at this time. Our new species, Kumimanu fordycei, is the most important fossil penguin ever found—at roughly 350 kilos, it could have weighed greater than [basketball player] Shaquille O’Neal on the peak of his dominance!”
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The paper is pay-walled. Nevertheless, it’s pretty sure that these are fossils of Shaq-sized penguins (Shaquins) that lived roughly 57 million years in the past, through the Paleocene Epoch.
Paleocene Temperature and CO2
The Shaquins thrived when the typical floor temperature of the Earth was doubtless 4-6 °C hotter than at this time, with atmospheric CO2 concentrations anyplace from 400 to three,500 ppmv.
Older is towards the left on the next graph:
Paleocene/Eocene Ice… Or lack thereof
We’ve been bombarded with claims that world warming and declining sea ice will drive the most important extant penguins to extinction.
Antarctica’s emperor penguins liable to extinction as a result of local weather disaster
By Ashley Strickland, CNN
Revealed 9:16 AM EDT, Sat October 29, 2022CNN —
As Antarctica’s emperor penguins are more and more threatened by the local weather disaster, the flightless seabirds will obtain new protections below the Endangered Species Act, or ESA.
With world warming melting the ocean ice the penguins rely on for his or her survival, the US Fish and Wildlife Service now categorizes the species as threatened. The federal company lists “imperiled species as endangered or threatened no matter their nation of origin.”
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If greenhouse fuel emissions proceed to rise at their present charges, resulting in warming temperatures and melting Antarctic sea ice, 98% of the emperor penguin inhabitants might all however disappear by 2100, in response to a research revealed final yr within the journal World Change Biology.
“The world must take aggressive actions to scale back greenhouse fuel emissions now, and the Paris Local weather Settlement targets have to be met, to assist forestall additional inhabitants declines,” Jenouvrier mentioned.
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Proper… Trendy penguins might be pushed to extinction by RCP8.5 and melting ice… Whereas the most important species of extinct penguins thrived in a world that was largely devoid of year-round ice cowl.
Older is towards the suitable on the next graph:
Shaquins thrived 15-20 million years previous to the institution of the Antarctic ice sheet, at a time when year-round ice was fairly nicely restricted to very excessive altitudes and sea ice (to the extent it existed) would have been seasonal.
“It’s powerful to make predictions, particularly in regards to the future”
Penguins clearly developed in a a lot hotter world, largely devoid of year-round ice and tailored to a a lot colder world with year-round icecaps and sea ice. They tailored to Late Pleistocene glacial and interglacial phases… However they can’t stroll away from this?
The trendy ~1 °C rise since pre-industrial occasions doesn’t even get away of the Quaternary Interval noise degree. One other 1 °C rise nonetheless gained’t even get away of the Quaternary noise degree, a lot much less method the heat of the Paleocene. Keep in mind that the HadSST3 information are of a lot larger decision than the δ18O time sequence. The amplitude of the proxy time sequence on multi-decadal to centennial time-scales must be thought of to be the minimal of the true variability on these time-scales, as a result of a lot decrease decision than the instrumental information (Ljungqvist, F.C. 2010).
Ponder this: Penguins first seem within the fossil report about 61 million years in the past, barely 4 million years after the Okay-Pg extinction. They’ve thrived via a lot hotter and far colder climates of the Cenozoic Period, but they’re allegedly doomed by one other 1 °C rise in temperature (1 °C is already “baked in”).
Penguins are some of the iconic teams of birds, serving as each a textbook instance of the evolution of secondarily aquatic ecology and as sentinels for the impacts of world change on ecosystem well being1. Though typically related to Antarctica within the fashionable creativeness, penguins originated greater than 60 million years in the past (Mya), evolving wing-propelled diving and dropping the capability for aerial flight lengthy earlier than the formation of polar ice sheets2. Over time, penguins developed the suite of morphological, physiological, and behavioral options that make them arguably essentially the most uniquely specialised of all extant birds. These variations have allowed penguins to colonize a few of the most excessive environments on Earth.
The notion that penguins are significantly threatened by trendy local weather change strikes me as absurd. Though, I suppose we will’t rule out the likelihood that world warming might result in the return of large electrical penguins…
References
Chapman, Graham, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam. Scott of the Antarctic. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Season 2, Episode 10. 1970.
Cole, T.L., Zhou, C., Fang, M. et al. Genomic insights into the secondary aquatic transition of penguins. Nat Commun 13, 3912 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-31508-9
Jenouvrier, S., Che-Castaldo, J., Wolf, S., Holland, M., Labrousse, S., LaRue, M., Wienecke, B., Fretwell, P., Barbraud, C., Greenwald, N., Stroeve, J., & Trathan, P. N. (2021). The decision of the emperor penguin: Authorized responses to species threatened by local weather change. World Change Biology, 27, 5008– 5029.
Ksepka, D., Discipline, D., Heath, T., Pett, W., Thomas, D., Giovanardi, S., & Tennyson, A. (2023). Largest-known fossil penguin offers perception into the early evolution of sphenisciform physique dimension and flipper anatomy. Journal of Paleontology, 1-20. doi:10.1017/jpa.2022.88
Ljungqvist, F.C. 2010. “A brand new reconstruction of temperature variability within the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere over the last two millennia”. Geografiska Annaler: Bodily Geography, Vol. 92 A(3), pp. 339-351, September 2010. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-459.2010.00399.x
Pagani, Mark, Michael Arthur & Katherine Freeman. (1999). “Miocene evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide”. Paleoceanography. 14. 273-292. 10.1029/1999PA900006.
Pearson, P. N. and Palmer, M. R.: Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the previous 60 million years, Nature, 406, 695–699,https://doi.org/10.1038/35021000, 2000.
Royer, et al., 2001. Paleobotanical Proof for Close to Current-Day Ranges of Atmospheric CO2 Throughout A part of the Tertiary. Science 22 June 2001: 2310-2313. DOI:10.112
Steinthorsdottir, M., Vajda, V., Pole, M., and Holdgate, G., 2019, “Average ranges of Eocene pCO2 indicated by Southern Hemisphere fossil plant stomata”: Geology, v. 47, p. 914–918, https://doi.org/10.1130/G46274.1
Zachos, J. C., Pagani, M., Sloan, L. C., Thomas, E. & Billups, Okay. “Tendencies, rhythms, and aberrations in world local weather 65 Ma to current”. Science 292, 686–-693 (2001).
