Using bird poop & vomit (from penguins and snow petrels) to study Antarctic climate changes

In this clip from Ep. 2 of the CERES Podcast, we take a look at two recent studies that coincidentally both used “bird excrement” as a climate proxy for studying the climate changes of the last few thousand years in Antarctica.
1) A paper that uses penguin poop to show that Antarctica went through a period of warming from 750-1250 AD that was similar to today;
2) A similar study (preprint) that uses snow petrel stomach oil sediments to reveal that Antarctica was similarly warm around 4500 BC.

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Chapters:
00:00:00 Using penguin poop to study Antarctic sea ice changes since 750 AD.
00:05:02 How warmer temperatures generally leads to more life.
00:07:43 Using stomach oil deposits from snow petrels to study Antarctic sea ice changes since 4500 BC
00:11:50 There have been similar studies in the Arctic
00:12:43 What are polynyas?

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⭐ If you want to support the work of CERES, please visit us at https://www.ceres-science.com/support-us
🔹 Dr. Ronan Connolly’s website: https://ronanconnollyscience.com/

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Relevant Links:

❶ Zheng et al. (2023) paper on using penguin poop to study Antarctic climate change https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108308
❷ Stevenson et al. (2025) – the preprint study on using Antarctic snow petrel deposits: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2025-513

Link to the full episode: https://rumble.com/v6rlz0t-using-penguin-poop-to-study-climate-how-nasa-got-climate-wrong-and-much-mor.html