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 tanding on a rocky black beach on Ross Island in Antarctica, David Ainley was surrounded by 260,000 noisy Adélie penguins. They squawked and trumpeted as mates welcomed each other, chicks begged for food and neighbors fought over nesting space. "This colony is the biggest it's been in 15 years," he said.
The growing penguin colony is actually a bad sign. A worried-sounding Ainley pointed to the open water offshore with just a few ice floes as the reason for the population boom. In the past, the penguins nesting here had to travel long distances across solid ice before they could dive in and fish. Now it is easier for them to supply their chicks with food, so the colony is well fed and growing every year.
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Adelie penguin colonies are becoming overcrowded in the south as ice disappears.
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But colonies farther north are shrinking. So much ice has melted there that the penguins must hunt in open water, where fish are much harder to catch. What's happened to the ice?
Trouble On The Ice
Antarctica is covered by an ice sheet as much as two miles thick. An ice shelf, with no land beneath it, stretches outward from the coast, floating on the ocean's surface.
Ainley became fascinated with Antarctica as a Boy Scout. He traveled there to research penguins as a graduate student.
What Ainley realized after several trips shocked him. Each year, more of the ice that penguins live on was melting away. He blames global warming-the heating up of the earth's climate caused by pollution from factories, cars and various human activities. Polluting gases trap heat close to the earth's surface. Many scientists believe these gases are changing the whole planet's climate.
Restoring the Earth
Ainley decided he had to fight global warming. He joined the environmentalists at H.T. Harvey and Associates in San Jose, California. His current project is far from Antarctica. He is working to turn a drained area near San Francisco Bay back into the salt marsh it once was. The area will again provide a home for terns, clapper rail birds and the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse.
Best of all, Ainley said, "there won't be factories or cars there, pumping out chemicals that cause global warming. It will be one more step toward protecting Antarctica."
By Sandra Markle/Antarctica
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