Halley Bay Emperor Penguin Colony

node · earth · Eastern Weddell Sea, Antarctica

A large emperor penguin colony on the fast ice of the eastern Weddell Sea, long regarded as one of the most stable in Antarctica and monitored from the nearby British Antarctic Survey station. From 2016 it failed almost completely: the landfast ice it breeds on broke out before the chicks had fledged, and it did so again in the following seasons, with satellite imagery showing thousands of chicks lost. Numbers at the neighbouring Dawson-Lambton colony rose over the same period, which is evidence of relocation rather than of simple loss and is the reason the episode is scientifically interesting rather than merely grim - it showed that emperors will move, and it showed the timescale on which a colony can cease to exist. It is the clearest documented case of a sea-ice event removing a vertebrate breeding population.

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Life at the PolesNature

Evidence · 1

Emperors on thin ice: three years of breeding failure at Halley Bay

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Sea Iceconstrained_by
Antarcticalocated_in

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/atlas?object=SITE_HALLEY_BAY_COLONY