In December 2022, Matthew Boyer hopped on an Argentine military plane to one of the more remote habitations on Earth: Marambio Station at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, where the icy continent stretches toward South America. Months before that, Boyer had to ship expensive, delicate instruments that might get busted by the time he landed.

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“When you arrive, you have boxes that have been sometimes sitting outside in Antarctica for a month or two in a cold warehouse,” said Boyer, a Ph.D. student in atmospheric science at the University of Helsinki. “And we’re talking about sensitive instrumentation.”

But the effort paid off, because Boyer and his colleagues found something peculiar about penguin guano. In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, they describe how ammonia wafting off the droppings of 60,000 birds contributed to the formation of clouds that might be insulating Antarctica, helping cool down an otherwise rapidly warming continent. Some penguin populations, however, are under serious threat because of climate change. Losing them and their guano could mean fewer clouds and more heating in an already fragile ecosystem, one so full of ice that it will significantly raise sea levels worldwide as it melts.

A better understanding of this dynamic could help scientists hone their models of how Antarctica will transform as the world warms. They can now investigate, for instance, if some penguin species produce more ammonia and, therefore, more of a cooling effect. “That’s the impact of this paper,” said Tamara Russell, a marine ornithologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who studies penguins but wasn’t involved in the research. “That will inform the models better, because we know that some species are decreasing, some are increasing, and that’s going to change a lot down there in many different ways.”

With their expensive instruments, Boyer and his research team measured atmospheric ammonia between January and March 2023, summertime in the southern hemisphere. They found that when the wind was blowing from an Adelie penguin colony 5 miles away from the detectors, concentrations of the gas shot up to 1,000 times higher than the baseline. Even when the penguins had moved out of the colony after breeding, ammonia concentrations remained elevated for at least a month, as the guano continued emitting the gas. That atmospheric ammonia could have been helping cool the area.

The researchers further demonstrated that the ammonia kicks off an atmospheric chain reaction. Out at sea, tiny plantlike organisms known as phytoplankton release the gas dimethyl sulfide, which transforms into sulphuric acid in the atmosphere. Because ammonia is a base, it reacts readily with this acid.

This coupling results in the rapid formation of aerosol particles. Clouds form when water vapor gloms onto any number of different aerosols, like soot and pollen, floating around in the atmosphere. In populated places, these particles are more abundant, because industries and vehicles emit so many of them as pollutants. Trees and other vegetation spew aerosols, too. But because Antarctica lacks trees and doesn’t have much vegetation at all, the aerosols from penguin guano and phytoplankton can make quite an impact.

In February 2023, Boyer and the other researchers measured a particularly strong burst of particles associated with guano, sampled a resulting fog a few hours later, and found particles created by the interaction of ammonia from the guano and sulphuric acid from the plankton. “There is a deep connection between these ecosystem processes, between penguins and phytoplankton at the ocean surface,” Boyer said. “Their gas is all interacting to form these particles and clouds.”

But here’s where the climate impacts get a bit trickier. Scientists know that in general, clouds cool Earth’s climate by reflecting some of the sun’s energy back into space. Although Boyer and his team hypothesize that clouds enhanced with penguin ammonia are probably helping cool this part of Antarctica, they note that they didn’t quantify that climate effect, which would require further research.

That’s a critical bit of information because of the potential for the warming climate to create a feedback loop. As oceans heat up, penguins are losing access to some of their prey, and colonies are shrinking or disappearing as a result. Fewer penguins producing guano means less ammonia and fewer clouds, which means more warming and more disruptions to the animals, and on and on in a self-reinforcing cycle.

“If this paper is correct — and it really seems to be a nice piece of work to me — [there’s going to be] a feedback effect, where it’s going to accelerate the changes that are already pushing change in the penguins,” said Peter Roopnarine, curator of geology at the California Academy of Sciences.

Scientists might now look elsewhere, Roopnarine adds, to find other bird colonies that could also be providing cloud cover. Protecting those species from pollution and hunting would be a natural way to engineer Earth systems to offset some planetary warming. “We think it’s for the sake of the birds,” Roopnarine said. “Well, obviously it goes well beyond that.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/science/research-penguin-poop-cooling-antarctica/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

With less than a month to go until summer, weather forecasters have been dropping some troubling news about what might be in store. AccuWeather had already predicted an especially active season — which begins June 1 — with up to 10 hurricanes out at sea, and its meteorologists are now forecasting a hotter-than-normal summer on land. Last week, the company warned that the three months could bring “sweltering heat, severe weather, intense wildfires, and the start of a dynamic hurricane season” — an echo of last summer, which was the hottest on record. In some places, like coastal cities along the Gulf Coast, those hazards could combine into dangerous “compound disasters,” with heat waves and hurricanes arriving back-to-back.

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The Trump administration’s cost-cutting crusade could make this summer’s weather all the more perilous. Mass layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have hurricane forecasters worried that they’ll lose access to the data they need to make accurate predictions of where storms will make landfall and at what intensity. And as electricity gets more expensive and global warming forces households to run their air-conditioning more, advocates worry that the loss of federal support for people struggling to pay their electric bills could leave a swath of the population especially vulnerable.

President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 budget, unveiled last week, would cancel the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides $4 billion a year to help people pay electricity bills, said Alison Coffey, senior policy analyst at the Boston-based nonprofit Initiative for Energy Justice. “We are about to experience one of the hottest summers on record,” Coffey said. “And this is happening at a time when U.S. households are really, really struggling to pay their utility bills.”

AccuWeather’s summer forecast isn’t the kind you get for your local weather, so they can’t tell you if it will be raining in your town on the Fourth of July. Instead, this seasonal forecast looks at weather trends in March and April, as well as larger phenomena like La Niña and El Niño, the two bands of warm and cold water in the Pacific Ocean that influence the atmosphere above the western U.S. AccuWeather compares all that to how those spring and summer months looked in previous years to get an idea of what might unfold this time around.

AccuWeather says that temperatures could run higher than average across the vast majority of the country this summer. Its forecast also warns of warmer nights, especially in the eastern U.S. These make heat waves all the more unbearable as the human body can’t get the respite of a cool night to bring down the physiological stress.

The eastern U.S. could also suffer through heat waves punctuated by thunderstorms that load the atmosphere with humidity. Those conditions make the human body less efficient at sweating, raising the risk of heat-related illnesses and deaths. Heat kills more people in the U.S. than any other natural disaster, in part because it can aggravate existing conditions like heart disease and asthma.

Out West, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon could see temperatures 3 degrees Fahrenheit (or more) higher than average. “The daytime highs are a bigger issue, [records] that could be challenged or broken in parts of the Northern Rockies and in the Northwest coming up this summer,” said Paul Pastelok, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.

High temperatures are going to increase wildfire risk, Pastelok added, because a dry, heat-baked landscape is a flammable landscape. Right now almost 40 percent of the U.S. is under drought conditions, double the area of last year. Some parts of the American West actually had a fairly wet winter, but that can also cause problems because strong-growing plants and trees can turn into fuel in the extra-hot summer heat. And as the season wears on, the landscape gets drier, so it’s more liable to burn catastrophically.

Day after day of relentless heat, especially if it’s humid out too, forces people to run the AC more to stay healthy. For the rich, that’s no problem. But lower-income folks suffer a high “energy burden,” meaning a $200 monthly utility bill is a much larger proportion of their income. Americans are also wrestling with an escalating cost-of-living crisis as rent and inflation march higher. With 1 in 6 American households now behind on their utility bills, according to the Initiative for Energy Justice, and 3 million of them having their power shut off each year, the danger is losing power during a heat wave this summer.

City dwellers face added risk here because of the urban heat island effect, the way sidewalks, parking lots, and buildings trap heat and make cities much hotter than surrounding rural areas. Lower-income neighborhoods get 15 to 20 degrees hotter than richer neighborhoods because they have fewer trees, which provide shade and cooling, according to Vivek Shandas, a climate adaptation scientist at Portland State University. “Those neighborhoods and the residents living in them just bear the brunt of that heat wave a lot more acutely than someone living in a more highly invested neighborhood, where tree canopy is lush.”

It will take a whole lot longer to fix the systemic issues that drive heat disparities in cities. But in the meantime, access to air-conditioning will be increasingly crucial as the planet warms. “Having financial assistance for low-income households to make sure that they can keep their electricity and their cooling on during the sweltering summer is more crucial than ever,” Coffey said.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-heat/summer-record-breaking-heat-hurricanes-liheap/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org