Antartican Penguin Population Meets With Disaster

Simon Daily 1 min read

Penguin Disaster In Antartica.

An Antartican Penguin colony has met with disaster this past season. Almost all of their offspring this season aside from two died. Terre Adélie is home to a population f 18,000 penguins. This year tragedy struck when the offspring of these pairs of penguins starved to death.

The cause of starvation was determined to be unusual sea ice. The sea ice became an issue for the penguins as it extended their search for food. Usually, the penguins do not have to travel as far in order to forage for food. Penguins survive on a krill diet a shrimp-like creature.

Penguins usually bring to mind happy images such as those in previous movies like Madagascar and Happy Feet. In comparison, Rod Downie at World Wildlife Fund said: “It’s more like ‘Tarantino does Happy Feet’, with dead penguin chicks strewn across a beach in Adélie Land.”

This is sad news for the penguins but not the end by any means. They have had similar tragedies in past years. A couple years back they had an ice rain that froze all of the offspring that season.

Watch the Penguins below.

Reported By Manisha Ganguly, CNN

The news from Terre Adélie came days after data captured by the European Space Agency’s CryoSat and Sentinel-1 satellites uncovered huge canyons below the surface of western Antarctica’s ice shelves.
Ice shelves extend out from areas of land, floating on the sea, the ESA explains; they slow the ice sheet’s movement towards the sea, reducing ice melt.
 Earlier this year a massive iceberg, more than three times the size of greater London and weighing more than a trillion tons, broke away from the Larsen C ice shelf in western Antarctica.
Calving is a natural occurrence, but scientists are exploring whether weather may play a role in speeding up such rifts.
Noel Gourmelen, from the University of Edinburgh, said ice melt from the Dotson ice shelf in western Antarctica means 40 billion tonnes of freshwater pours into the Southern Ocean every year.
“Since (the) shelves are already suffering from thinning, these deepening canyons mean fractures are likely to develop and the grounded ice upstream will flow faster than would be the case otherwise,” Gourmelen said in a statement.

 

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