Penguins, Antarctica, and Global Warming
Ron Naveen believes that penguins are indicators of ocean change and, ultimately, sentinels of change. Since 1994, the Oceanites’ Antarctic site inventory has been monitoring and analyzing penguin and seabird population changes across the vast Antarctic Peninsula, where it’s warming faster than anywhere else on earth except the Arctic. Working with collaborative partners, The Lynch Lab at Stony Brook University, Penguin Lifelines at the University of Oxford (UK), and One Oceans Expeditions (Canada), Oceanites represents the world’s only nonprofit, publicly supported Antarctic research program. Oceanites is the only project monitoring the entire Antarctic Peninsula region — analyzing change across the warming Antarctic Peninsula and interpreting, translating, and decoding why what happens in Antarctica—to its penguins, wildlife, land, ice, and surrounding Southern Ocean—affects all of us.
Mr. Naveen's Athenaeum talk is co-sponsored by the Roberts Environmental Center and the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, both at CMC.