Satellite images have revealed horrific emperor penguin carnage in climate change-stricken Antarctica as sea ice melted underneath the birds’ colonies last yr, leaving helpless chicks to drown in frigid waters.
The Antarctic spring of 2022 can have been the worst in history for the magnificent emperor penguins that inhabit the frozen continent. As sea ice broke up beneath their feet at a speed never seen before, colony after colony was left in tatters as chicks, too young to survive within the ice-cold waters, drowned or froze to death.
Researchers on the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) observed the tragedy because it unfolded in satellite images and have now shared their findings in a brand new study.
Related: Climate change hits Antarctica hard, sparking concerns about irreversible tipping points
“Emperor penguins are having a very bad yr this yr,” Peter Fretwell, a remote-sensing scientist on the BAS and lead creator of the study, told Space.com in an interview. “Their breeding success has been really impacted by the dearth of sea ice.”
Fretwell has been studying distant colonies of emperor penguins using satellite images for the last 15 years. These imposing birds, the tallest of all penguin species, inhabit the harshest environments on Earth. Adapted to face up to temperatures as little as minus 76 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 60 degrees Celsius), the penguins breed on sea ice, where they live in colonies of a whole lot of people. Fretwell and his team have previously witnessed what sea ice loss can do to those colonies. In 2016, 2017 and 2018, a big colony in Halley Bay lost just about all of its chicks when warmer-than-usual weather decimated the ocean ice.
“The emperor penguins have a novel breeding cycle, and it breeds within the Antarctic winter moderately than the summer,” Fretwell said. “It needs sea ice and it needs the ocean ice to be stable between April and December, because when it lays an egg and the chick hatches, the chick must have a stable platform to live to tell the tale.”
Covered only in fluffy down, penguin chicks cannot swim and fish for food until they develop their outer waterproof jacket. This often happens in December, about three months after the chicks hatch. Until then, the chicks fully rely upon their doting parents to feed them and huddle together on the floating ice to maintain warm while their parents fish. If the ice underneath the colony disintegrates too early within the season, the chicks stand no probability. They drown or freeze to death.
“This yr, that happened to numerous colonies,” said Fretwell. “Many more this yr than we have ever seen before.”
Satellite images taken by the European Earth-observation satellite Sentinel-2 revealed that each one colonies within the Bellingshausen Sea within the west of Antarctica lost nearly all of their young ones.
“On this area, we have got possibly between 5,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs,” said Fretwell. “There must be 5,000 to 10,000 chicks there. There was one place where they did survive, but they still only had about 200 chicks.”
Many of the emperor penguin colonies are only known because of satellite images, because the stately birds inhabit the harshest and most inaccessible places. Scientists can track those colonies because of brown spots the penguins’ feces leave on the pristine ice. Because of probably the most cutting-edge satellites, those that provide resolutions of about 12 inches (30 centimeters), researchers may even distinguish individual adult birds.
The horror scientists witnessed last yr is probably going only the tip of the iceberg, as there are numerous smaller, less visible animal species that too rely upon sea ice to survive and breed. Those species will need to have been hit equally hard by the record lack of sea ice that hit the continent within the Antarctic spring and summer of 2022 and 2023. For all these species, more hard years likely lie ahead.
“Our models suggest that, in a scenario where climate change continues as is for the time being, we’ll lose 90% of the [emperor penguin] colonies by the tip of the century,” said Fretwell. “How much they’ll proceed after that is tough to inform.”
Scientists are already bracing for one more yr of disasters. After hitting an absolute record low in February this yr, sea ice across the coast of Antarctica didn’t replenish because the continent moved into its winter months, remaining well below seasonal averages at an unprecedented low.
For years, Antarctica appeared to have held more regular against progressing climate change that has long visibly decimated its northern counterpart, the Arctic. In recent times, the results of the warming climate have caught up with the ice cap covering the south pole, sparking concerns of irreversible tipping points.
Years of record-low sea ice extent not only harm the Antarctic fauna but in addition bode sick for the continent’s glaciers which can be growing more fragile yr on yr. The break of the Antarctic ecosystem shall be felt worldwide through rising sea levels and altered ocean currents, which is able to make the planet more vulnerable to further warming.
The study was published within the journal Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday, Aug. 24.