Huge colonies of emperor penguins saw no chicks survive last year as sea ice disappears
Huge colonies of emperor penguins saw no chicks survive last year as sea ice disappears
As rapidly warming global temperatures help push Antarctica's sea ice to unprecedented lows, it's threatening the very existence of one of the continent's most iconic species: emperor penguins.
Four out of five emperor penguin colonies analyzed in the Bellingshausen Sea, west of the Antarctic Peninsula, saw no chicks survive last year as the area experienced an enormous loss of sea ice, according to a new study published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
As rapidly warming global temperatures help push Antarctica's sea ice to unprecedented lows, it's threatening the very existence of one of the continent's most iconic species: emperor penguins.
This widespread "catastrophic breeding failure" is the first such recorded incident, according to the report, and supports grim predictions that more than 90 per cent of emperor penguin colonies will be "quasi-extinct" by 2100 as the world warms.
When the sea ice breaks earlier, chicks can fall into the water and drown, said Norman Ratcliffe, co-author of the study and seabird biologist with the British Antarctic Survey.
"There is mounting evidence that emperor penguins may actually go extinct directly due to loss of sea ice resulting from our planet's warming," she told CNN.
A separate study published last year found that 65 per cent of Antarctica's native species, emperor penguins top among them, will likely disappear by the end of the century if the world fails to rein in planet-warming fossil fuel pollution.
Antarctic sea ice also helps regulate the planet's temperature, reflecting the sun's incoming energy back to space.
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