Satellite mapping finds new colony of Emperor penguins

LONDON: Satellite mapping technology has discovered another new colony of the highly threatened Emperor penguins in Antarctica, researchers revealed on Friday.

The find, announced by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to mark Penguin Awareness Day, brings the total number of known emperor penguin breeding sites around Antarctica´s coastline to 66.

It is the latest in a series of Emperor penguin breeding sites detected using the satellite technology.

The birds, which are endemic to Antarctica and the biggest of the 18 penguin species at around 1.2 metres (nearly four feet) tall, face almost complete annihilation due to climate change and the loss of sea ice.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service last year placed Emperor penguins, which need sea ice to breed, on its endangered species list, calling the move “an alarm bell” and “call to action”.

Recent projections suggest that under current warming trends, 80 percent of colonies will be quasi-extinct by the end of the century.

Scientists from the BAS uncovered the latest site, home to around 500 birds, by identifying signs of penguin excrement, known as guano, on the landscape at Verleger Point in West Antarctica.

Guano stains the snow and rock terrain brown and is easy to spot, while the flightless birds themselves are too small to be seen from satellites.

The researchers studied images from the EU´s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite mission and compared them with high resolution footage from the MAXAR WorldView3 satellite.

Peter Fretwell, who studies wildlife from space at BAS and was lead author of the research revealing the find, called it “exciting” but cautioned that the existential risk to the birds remained.