Emperor Penguins Affected by Warming in Antarctica

Polar bears were in the spotlight after it turned out that they were defenseless against global warming and the melting ice caused by it. But polar bears are not the only inhabitants of the polar latitudes that already feel the negative impact of climate change. In the snowy south of our planet, penguins live, which also suffer from a reduction in the area of ice cover.

Scientists analyzed the condition of one of the emperor penguin populations that lives in West Antarctica, in the Branta Glacier area. In 2015, the once-large colony of these penguins was on the verge of extinction. After comparing many factors, scientists came to the conclusion that the El Niño Current, which provoked the early melting of ice off the Arctic coast, was to blame.

The peculiarity of the emperor penguins is that the rocky coasts are not suitable for them, but for life and breeding, they usually choose ice open spaces. Emperor penguins need ice cover on which the future generation is growing and gaining strength. But that year, the chicks, as always hatched at the end of the Antarctic winter, did not have time to grow and change their plumage before the colony found itself on a crumbling ice floe in the ocean. Young birds were defenseless before the storms and were not ready to swim, as they did not have time to go through the molting stage. According to scientists, almost all the chicks that were born in 2015 died because the ice melted too early, and frequent storms were observed. This caused tremendous damage to the colony, the ranks of which significantly thinned.

But scientists hastened to assure that this incident did not greatly affect the total number of all emperor penguins. Currently, biologists estimate the number of representatives of this species at least 260 thousand individuals, so nothing threatens the emperor penguins. But this case once again proves that climate change is happening too quickly and the animals living on our planet do not always have time to adapt to them.