South of South America lies the Antarctic, and this region is suffering from the folly of mankind. The melting ice cap is causing almost total and catastrophic mortality among Emperor penguin chicks, jeopardizing their reproduction and the survival of the species.
This is a terrible situation that can be explained by global warming, which is destabilizing the ice cap. At this rate, these seabirds, endemic to the South Pole, could well be the first species to disappear from the planet’s surface.
Emperor penguins are likely to become the first polar species to become extinct as a result of global warming.
A recently published scientific dossier, however, notes a “grim” total mortality of chicks in several Antarctic colonies, following the record melting of the sea ice in recent months.
Studying the behavior of five colonies in the Bellingshausen Sea region of West Antarctica, all but one suffered a “catastrophic” 100% loss of chicks, who drowned or froze to death when the ice gave way beneath their tiny legs. They were not mature enough to cope with such conditions, the researchers report in Communications: Earth & Environment, a Springer Nature journal.
“This is the first major failure of emperor penguin reproduction in several colonies at the same time due to melting sea ice, and it’s probably a sign of what’s to come in the future,” lead author Peter Fretwell, a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey, told AFP. We’ve been predicting it for some time, but to actually see it happen is eerie”.
Last spring, in the Southern Hemisphere region from mid-September to mid-December 2022, the Antarctic ice pack, which forms by freezing the ocean’s salt water, had reached record melting speeds, before dropping in February to its lowest level since satellite measurements began 45 years ago. This early melting came in the middle of the emperor penguins’ already complex and fragile breeding season.
The renowned British Antarctic Survey estimates that, at the current rate of global warming, almost all emperor penguins could disappear by the end of the century.
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