太空照片惊现企鹅超级帝国英语美文

　　Scientists have stumbled across a huge group of previously unknown Adélie penguins on the most northerly point of the Antarctic Peninsula.

　　科学家们在南极半岛最北端无意中发现了一大群以前不为人知的阿德利企鹅。

　　Numbering more than 1.5 million birds, they were first noticed when great patches of their poo, or guano, showed up in pictures taken from space.

　　这超过150万只的企鹅种群首次被注意到，是因为它们的大便出现在从太空拍摄到的照片中。

　　The animals are crammed on to a rocky archipelago called the Danger Islands.

　　这些动物挤在一个叫险恶群岛的岩石群岛上。

　　The researchers, who detail the discovery in the journal Scientific Reports, say it is a total surprise.

　　研究人员在《科学报道》杂志上详细介绍了这一发现，他说这是一个惊喜。

　　"It’s a classic case of finding something where no-one really looked! The Danger Islands are hard to reach, so people didn’t really try that hard," team-member Dr Tom Hart from Oxford University, UK, told BBC News.

　　英国牛津大学的团队成员Tom Hart博士告诉BBC：“这是一个经典的找到没有人真正注意过的东西的案例!险恶群岛很难到达，所以人们并没有真正尝试这么做。”

　　The scientists used an algorithm to search images from the American Landsat spacecraft for sites of possible penguin activity.

　　科学家们使用一种算法从美国大地卫星航天器搜索可能存在企鹅活动的地点的图像。

　　Landsat does not return especially high-resolution pictures and so when the system flagged potential colonies, they had to be followed up with much sharper pictures for confirmation.

　　大地卫星不会返回特别高分辨率的图片，因此当系统标记潜在的群落时，他们必须跟踪更加清晰的图片以进行确认。