Alain Hubert slowly made his way down an icy crevasse on Antarctica’s Princess Rangnhild Coast to a large plain of snow and ice early last month.

Spread across the frozen tundra before him, 9,000 members of a never-before-visited colony of emperor penguins huddled together for warmth against the subzero temperatures of the world’s coldest continent.

Hubert, a Belgian expedition leader and engineer for the Princess Elisabeth Antarctica Polar Research Station, says he decided to go looking for the emperor penguin colony after coming across a satellite map estimating its location. “I had noticed individual penguins along the coastline for years but had never come across a colony,” Hubert says. “It was a miracle finding it in an area that is almost entirely unexplored.”

Scientists with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) first uncovered evidence of the colony back in 2009 while scanning the white snow and ice of Antarctica by satellite. They noticed strange brown splotches they couldn’t initially identify. “After a while, we came to the conclusion that it was guano from an emperor penguin colony,” says Phil Trathan, head of conservation biology for the survey group. “We said ‘Hey, if we can see this one, we can see others.’”

View a slide show of the emperor penguin colony.

The BAS team located Hubert’s colony as well as six other previously unknown emperor penguin colonies that year. Since then Trathan and fellow BAS researchers have been busy locating and estimating the full population count of emperor penguins across Antarctica using the satellite scanning technique. Survey geographer Peter Fretwell says the team uses low- to medium-resolution satellite cameras to find distinctive brown regions of snow and ice that are evidence of a colony. Next, high-resolution cameras and a technique called pan-sharpening help to enhance ground resolution (the size of objects a satellite can depict from orbit) to around 50 centimeters. Fretwell says that resolution makes it possible to distinguish individual penguins separated from the group as well as small clusters of birds.

The researchers released a census of Antarctica’s penguins in April 2012 showing a total of 46 separate colonies with a combined population of almost 600,000 birds, nearly twice as many as were previously thought to live in Antarctica. Fretwell says the BAS is working with an international team of researchers and polar explorers including Hubert in Antarctica to adapt the satellite-mapping approach for long-term monitoring of the emperor population. Although the penguins are not endangered, rapidly rising temperatures in the region could wear away the ice that the one-meter-tall birds call home.

The researchers will need to collect three to four more years of satellite and ground data in order to develop a methodology robust enough to track emperor penguin numbers on local, regional and continental scales, Fretwell says. “Ground counts corroborate our satellite data and help us improve our methods,” he says. “But because of the extreme conditions in Antarctica, we have ground data from maybe two of the almost 50 colonies. So there is definitely a lot of work left to be done.”

Hubert, who is not affiliated with the BAS, trekked 50 kilometers from where he was working with Elisabeth Antarctica station glaciologists to visit the bird colony. He says he plans on sharing his observations with the survey when he returns to Europe.

4 Comments

1. 1. meansamom 12:55 PM 1/18/13

   This is more a question than a comment:
   I am not familiar with the geography of Antarctica. In one of the slides titled 'Seaside View', the East Antartica Coast was mentioned. Where exactly is the East Antartica Coast? Is it arbitrarily named? my understanding is that there shouldn't be a true east coast if the land mass encloses the South Pole.

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2. 2. RobertdK 08:36 PM 1/21/13

   “Humans Make First Contact with Emperor Penguin Colony” I believe that, perhaps, the first time was during the 1910–1913 British Antarctic Expedition led by Robert Falcon Scott. As the bird nests during the Antarctic winter, it was necessary to mount a special expedition in July 1911 from the expedition's base at Cape Evans to the penguins' rookery at Cape Crozier. It was Dr Edward Wilson, the expedition’s zoologist together with Mr. Cherry-Garrard and Mr. 'Birdie' Bowers who crossed the Ross Ice Shelf under conditions of complete darkness and temperatures of −40°C and below. It was Wilson’s personal goal in Antarctica was to recover eggs of the Emperor penguin for scientific study. Cherry-Garrard later described the ordeal in his book The Worst Journey in the World.

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3. 3. antarcticbase in reply to meansamom 06:32 AM 1/22/13

   Hi Meansamom- East Antarctica is all that which lies on the Indian Ocean side of the Transantarctic Mountains. There's a good map which illustrates this here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Antarctica

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4. 4. verdai 05:38 PM 1/25/13

   They're such most charming people.

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