Whole Colonies Of Emperor Penguin Chicks Wiped Out, Sea Ice Area Collapses: Antarctic Work "A Gut Punch" For Scientists

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The southern continent has suffered dramatic shifts that raise serious concerns about its immediate health. They have coincided with evidence that longer-term transformations linked to the climate crisis have started much sooner than it was assumed was likely. The changes have ramifications for local wildlife, but also for people across the globe in ways that are often less well understood.

Antarctic sea ice cover crashed for six months straight, to a level so far below anything else on the satellite record that scientists struggled for adjectives to describe what they were witnessing.

While the full effect is yet to be documented, a peer-reviewed paper in August gave some insight into what it might mean. Examining satellite images, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey found that the then record drop in sea ice in late 2022 – before this year’s larger slump – could have killed thousands of emperor penguin chicks. The usually stable sea ice that colonies rely on to rear their young in the Bellingshausen Sea just wasn’t there, likely causing a “catastrophic breeding failure”.

That event in the west of the continent followed parts of the east – the coldest place on Earth – last year recording what scientists think is the biggest heatwave ever recorded, with temperatures peaking at 39C above normal. Looking ahead, a study published in Nature in March found meltwater from the continent’s ice sheets could dramatically slow down the Southern Ocean overturning circulation, a deep ocean current, by 2050 if greenhouse gas emissions continued at their current level. Two months later, a paper by some of the same researchers estimated the circulation, which influences global weather patterns and ocean temperatures and nutrient levels, had already slowed by about 30% since the 1990s.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/31/red-alert-in-antarctica-the-year-rapid-dramatic-change-hit-climate-scientists-like-a-punch-in-the-guts