Experts studying images taken from space were initially baffled by reddish-brown splodges on the ice.
"It turned out they were the feces, guano stains, of the emperors," Trathan said. "There's a really good contrast between the dark poo stains and the ice."
Scientists widened the search for the tell-tale blots to 90 percent of the Antarctic coastline and found 38 colonies.
More than 17 million people in Bangladesh would be displaced by a sea level rise of 1.5 metres, warned Jonathan Bamber, a professor at Bristol University in England, disclosing a study report which found that a collapse of the ice sheet of West Antarctica would push up world sea levels by 3.3 metres (11 ft) over hundreds of years.
Washington, May 15: If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses due to global warming, it would directly threaten New York, Washington and San Francisco as sea levels near US coasts would rise by 25 per cent more than the global average, according to a new study. Antarctica holds about nine times the volume of ice of Greenland.
Theory has suggested that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be inherently unstable. Recent observations lend weight to this hypothesis. This article reassess the potential contribution to eustatic and regional sea level from a rapid collapse of the ice sheet and find that previous assessments have substantially overestimated its likely primary contribution.
Volume changes in the Antarctic Ice Sheet are poorly understood, despite the importance of the ice sheet to sea-level and climate variability. Over both millennial and shorter time scales, net water influx to the ice sheet (mainly snow accumulation) nearly balances water loss through ice calving and basal ice shelf melting at the ice sheet margins.
Mathematical modelling and time series analysis techniques are important tools for extracting information from complex geotime series. These techniques also facilitate a fair degree of prediction, which is one of the prime goals of science. The data analysis strategy for such a purpose mainly involves spectral analysis and pattern classification.
