Peter Fretwell at the British Antarctic Survey has called them "maybe the world's unluckiest" penguins, but they caught an unexpected break over the summer. When a massive iceberg broke off from the Brunt ice shelf in May and drifted to a stop in front of the Halley Bay penguin colony, apparently cutting off its access to the sea, Fretwell feared it would doom the group of emperor penguins, the BBC reports. He worried that mothers hunting for food would be unable to reach newly hatched chicks. During the dark Antarctic winter, satellites couldn't take pictures of the area but Fretwell got a surprise a few days ago when he opened images recently taken by Sentinel-1 satellites.
"I was dreading seeing that there wouldn't be anything there at all," Fretwell tells the BBC, but the images showed the colony had survived. Icebergs have wiped out penguin colonies in similar situations. Fretwell says that with the iceberg was around 50 feet high, too tall for the penguins to climb, it's not clear how they survived. He believes a crack in the ice may have saved them. "Even if there is just a small crack, they might have dived underneath it," he says. The Halley Bay colony was almost entirely wiped out in 2016 when severe weather broke up sea ice before the penguin chicks could swim. Surviving penguins re-established the colony, once the world's second biggest, at a site around 20 miles away,
Fretwell says conditions at the penguins' current home, the McDonald Ice Rumples, are unpredictable and the colony could still face disaster if the ice breaks up before December, when the chicks will be able to swim. "They're such incredible animals. It's a bit bleak. Like many animals in Antarctica, they live on the sea ice," he says. "But it is changing, and if your habitat changes then it's never good." In his research, Fretwell looks for tell-tale signs of penguin guano in satellite images. Earlier this year, he spotted four previously unknown colonies. (More penguins stories.)
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