Climate change hits emperor penguins: Chicks are dying and extinction looms, study finds

Now climate change is coming for the penguins.

Due to the dramatic loss of sea ice, several colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctica face "quasi-extinction" in the decades to come, a study released Thursday reports.

"This paper dramatically reveals the connection between sea ice loss and ecosystem annihilation," said Jeremy Wilkinson, a sea ice physicist at the British Antarctic Survey. "Climate change is melting sea ice at an alarming rate."

The study found that emperor penguin colonies saw unprecedented and "catastrophic" breeding failure in a part of Antarctica where there was total sea ice loss in 2022. The discovery supports predictions that over 90% of emperor penguin colonies will be "quasi-extinct" by the end of the century, based on current global warming trends.

What does quasi-extinction mean?

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, quasi-extinction means that a "population essentially is still in existence, but reproductively speaking, there’s no way in the world it can increase.”

Thus, for emperor penguins, this means that even if individuals are alive, the population is sufficiently low that it can’t recover and will ultimately become extinct.

Loss of sea ice imperils penguin chicks

The study found that last year, no chicks survived from four of the five known emperor penguin colonies in the central and eastern Bellingshausen Sea, which is west of the Antarctic Peninsula where there was a 100% loss of sea ice in November 2022.

Emperor penguins hatch their eggs and raise their chicks on sea ice. If the sea ice breaks up under them, the young chicks will drown or freeze to death.

What's new about the study findings is that "this is the first major breeding failure of emperor penguins at a regional scale due to sea ice loss, and probably a sign of things to come," study lead author Peter Fretwell of the British Antarctic Survey told USA TODAY.

“We have never seen emperor penguins fail to breed, at this scale, in a single season," he added. "The loss of sea ice in this region during the Antarctic summer made it very unlikely that displaced chicks would survive."

Overall, of 62 known penguin colonies, around 30% were harmed by low sea ice levels last year – and 13 likely failed entirely, Fretwell said.

Record low:Antarctic sea ice reaches another record low

What is sea ice?

Sea ice is frozen ocean water that has an annual cycle of melting during the summer and refreezing in winter. Antarctic sea ice is typically at its smallest in late February or early March, toward the end of summer in the Southern Hemisphere. It floats on top of the ocean.

Over the past seven years, sea ice around Antarctica has decreased significantly. By the end of December 2022, sea ice extent was the lowest seen in the 45-year satellite record. In the Bellingshausen Sea, the home of the penguin colonies in this study, sea ice didn’t start to re-form until late April 2023.

The scientists examined satellite images that showed the loss of sea ice at breeding sites.

"We know that emperor penguins are highly vulnerable in a warming climate – and current scientific evidence suggests that extreme sea ice loss events like this will become more frequent and widespread," Fretwell said.

Huge amount of sea ice already missing

Sea ice continues to decrease in 2023. The missing area is larger than the size of Greenland, or around 10 times the size of the United Kingdom, according to the British Antarctic Survey.

“Right now, in August 2023, the sea ice extent in Antarctica is still far below all previous records for this time of year," said Caroline Holmes, a polar climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey. "In this period where oceans are freezing up, we’re seeing areas that are still, remarkably, largely ice-free."

Holmes added that the recent years of tumbling sea ice records and warming of the subsurface Southern Ocean "point strongly to human-induced global warming exacerbating these extremes.”

A warning sign for humanity

Speaking about the penguin study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment, Wilkinson concluded, "it is another warning sign for humanity that we cannot continue down this path, politicians must act to minimize the impact of climate change. There is no time left.”

Contributing: The Associated Press