The emperor penguin disaster: they are dead …

The emperor penguin population has been declining for years and a study published in the scientific journal Antarctic Science explains the reason: penguins die because of the melting of their habitat.

The study described as "catastrophic" what happened in the colony of Halley, the second colony of emperor penguins. Located in a bay in the Weddell Sea, this colony has hosted up to 25,000 pairs that went there each year to breed.

What has changed in recent years is that the ice on the platform where the penguin nest melts well before the time. Bays like Halley, protected from the rigors of the Antarctic climate, had enough ice in the summer to breed penguins. If the ice breaks before having moved their feathers and strengthened their lungs, the chicks die when they fall into the water because they do not know how to swim.

According to research, the behavior of the Halley Bay ice floe began to vary in early spring 2015. Peter Fretwell and Philip Trathan, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey authors of the study, badociate the change to the El Niño phenomenon , which had the strongest stormy weather of the last 60 years, with strong winds and a record reduction in sea ice.

The year that followed this phenomenon, the ice broke in October, before the penguins were stronger to survive. The same thing happened in 2017 and 2018.

Breeding difficulties in Halley resulted in a ten-fold increase in the population of the emperor penguin colony at Dawson-Lambton, 55 kilometers to the south.

The study by Fretwell and Trathan confirms what other research was anticipating on the risks faced by emperor penguins for climate change. Already in 2014, Nature Climate Change published a study by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which warned that this species would be significantly reduced due to global warming.