No sooner has the emperor penguin begun to reveal its secrets than it’s already disappearing. Beacon of a climate in crisis, this emblematic Antarctic bird could disappear before we even get to know it.
The emperor penguin blends into an icy landscape, between pack ice and icebergs, under which it dives for more than 30 minutes and to more than 500 meters at its best, in search of pockets of krill and fish. It passes through cracks and polynyas to reach the surface, where it stays back on the coastal ice to reproduce.
Standing over a meter tall and weighing up to 36 kilograms for the largest specimens, they huddle together to weather a blizzard. Over half a million birds live around the Antarctic continent, and it is difficult to reach them and observe them.
Atka Bay and Pointe de la Géographie are examples of well-known colonies, due to their proximity to German and French research stations. But for the 66 colonies currently listed, it’s the brown patches on the pack and fast ice that give away their presence and, thanks to zooming and algorithms, allow us to deduce their number.
Even more accurate are counts by drones, helicopters or small planes. They have proven their worth around Antarctica, flying over colonies at a constant height, like a courtesy flight. Scientists mark them or take blood samples and, from the genome, understand where they come from and where they’re going.
If not as part of national research expeditions, these scientists can board cruise ships, as in 2004, 2009, and 2024 with Quark, near Snow Hill, where between 11,000 and 12,000 penguins live in several groups. This colony was first described in 1997.
Encounters and measurements remain sporadic, even near Dumont-d’Urville, where it is still necessary to travel and spend some time on site to observe them. In 2022, near the Neumayer III station, a remote-controlled robot named Echo was tested to study the colony of 26,000 individuals, which is also monitored by 12 cameras.
A sentinel species, as it is referred to in conferences, reports, and publications, it is a beacon of change because its population declines as the planet warms.
A Decline twice as fast as forecast
Four years ago, scientists used mathematical formulas to predict the future of emperor penguins. The models predicted that four out of five colonies would be lost by 2060 and that the species would nearly become extinct by 2100. At that time, only 54 colonies were known, 22 of which were experiencing extreme weather events.
Suffice to say that scientists from the British Antarctic Survey and the CNRS, to name but a few, have not ceased work on their calculations, knowing that all models can be improved. Especially since new colonies have gradually appeared on satellite images.
In March 2024, it was revealed that the decline was already well underway and that between 2009 and 2019, 10% of these diving birds had already disappeared. Less ice and more extreme events: heavy rain, heavy snowfall, prolonged storms, etc. For these slow-growing birds, losses are less easily replaced. It takes them five years to reach breeding age.
Not all colonies are affected in the same way. The steepest declines can be seen in the Weddell Sea or along the coasts facing the Indian Ocean and Australia. This year, in June, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey, including Peter Fretwell and Philippe Trathan, repeated the measurements over a quarter of Antarctica and over a longer period.
The decline observed there is actually twice as great as the latest predictions. The emperor’s demise by the end of the century is to be feared, even though new colonies are being discovered every year.
Colonies on the move, disappearing and rediscovered
In 2019, the Umbeashi colony disappeared after the ice on which it used to breed became unstable. Another cross on the list of missing colonies. In 2020, 11 new colonies appeared on scientists’ maps, which had been updated thanks to the Sentinel-2 surveillance satellite. This brought the number of known colonies to 61 (30 of which were discovered by satellite).
It’s only very recently that this type of imaging has enabled us to keep an eye on emperor penguins. Or to rediscover them, as in the case of 3 colonies, sometimes found 50 kilometers from their original position. Even if contact has been re-established, it has to be said that they are all in the area most affected by sea ice decrease.
In 2021, a group of penguins reappeared in Umbeashi, suggesting that this was the lost colony that had reformed. In January 2023, 500 penguins were discovered in the Amundsen Sea. A small group also located in a climatically critical zone.
In early 2024, four new penguin colonies appeared on Sentinel-2 and Maxar WorldView-2 images across Antarctica, from the Lazarev ice shelf on the coast of Queen Maud Land to Verleger Point.
Like the pulses of a body slowly losing strength, small groups appear and disappear as their habitat endures repeated assaults from a warming sea.
An endangered habitat
In 2010, an iceberg collided with the penguin colony in the Dumont d’Urville Sea. This mass of ice and the accompanying ice flotilla created a traffic jam, slowing the emperor penguins’ march toward open water. This was followed by abnormal mortality among young chicks between 2011 and 2014.
The population then declined by half, according to 2021 surveys. After excessive ice gains, an overall decline began in 2016. Since then, the Antarctic sea ice sheet has regularly broken records for low extent, both in summer and winter.
But it is not only the hard ground on which they need to stand that is at stake; also at issue are the abundance of krill, access to krill, and the arrival of other predators that spawn in waters with less ice.
All researchers agree that it is not so much the melting that threatens the species, but rather climate instability, or the combined effect of both, compounded by catastrophic events.
Massive breeding failures
In August 2023, in the Bellingshausen Sea, four colonies disappeared completely at the same time, under the restful gaze of Sentinel-2 in orbit. The ground gave way beneath the feet of the adults, who can swim, and the chicks, who did not yet have waterproof feathers.
Too early, in short, too young to die in such an early catastrophe. In terms of numbers, there were not many animals, between 630 and 3,500 pairs, but the signal remains strong. This is the first massive regional failure involving several colonies simultaneously in December, before the young birds take flight.
A perilous journey for young emperors
Even though “flight” is used to describe the autonomy of juvenile people, penguins still cannot fly. Except perhaps when they jump off a 10-meter ice wall. Filmed for the first time in 2024 in Atka Bay, 700 chicks inadvertently made their way toward an ice platform.
Doubtless fooled by low clouds, they climbed the gentle slope of a melted ice tongue, leaving the fast ice behind. Fortunately, their skeletons are still flexible, and the event simply produced beautiful images of chicks letting go. It’s afterwards that things get tricky.
A September 2022 study reveals that young emperors are reaching 600 kilometers further north than their estimated range and entering areas where krill fishing takes place.
Ultimately, protected areas cover only 10% of the empire, due to repeated stalling of additional marine protected area projects amongst the CCAMLR (Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources). The international framework is powerless to protect the species, and the bird is emperor in name only.
Beacon of a collapsing climate
In June 2022, the 44th Antarctic Treaty diplomatic meeting in Berlin failed to adopt a special conservation plan for emperor penguins. At these secret meetings, where no one publicly denounces the deadlock, rumors point to China as the nation responsible for the stalemate, despite the weight of scientific evidence (which is far more inclined to defend krill exploitation than protection).
Conservationists have seen the same disappointment repeat itself in Finland, India and Italy this year. Other ways should make it possible to recognize the vulnerable state in which the species finds itself.
It is expected to be added to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species next year, but, as was the case when it was added to the US Endangered Species Act in 2022, what will be the impact? Given that the threat is directly linked to the imbalance between greenhouse gas emissions and absorption.
Human activity pushes the emperor from his throne, and we witness it through satellites, servers, laboratories and communications… as if it were the people of another planet. Except, perhaps, it’s our own decline we’re talking about.