#british antarctic survey

[stevviefox]

If you’d like to count walrus from space.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Source: New Scientist

Scientists spot previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins in Antarctica

25 January 2024

Scientists have spotted previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins in new satellite imagery.

At least some emperor penguins are moving their colonies as melting ice from climate change threatens breeding grounds.

The British Antarctic Survey said Wednesday that the four newly found colonies likely existed for many years, but scientists hadn’t previously spotted them.

Emperor penguins are considered “near threatened” with extinction and live in Antarctica.

While the newly spotted colonies don’t greatly change overall population estimates, they help scientists understand where penguins might be moving.

[xtruss]

‘Like Going To The Moon’: The World’s Most Terrifying Ocean Crossing

— Julia Buckley, CNN | Monday February 5, 2024

The Drake Passage is feared by travelers and sailors alike. Gerald Corsi/iStockphoto/Getty Images

It’s the body of water that instils fear and inspires sailors in equal measure. Six hundred miles of open sea, and some of the roughest conditions on the planet – with an equally inhospitable land of snow and ice awaiting you at the end of it.

“The most dreaded bit of ocean on the globe – and rightly so,” Alfred Lansing wrote of explorer Ernest Shackleton’s 1916 voyage across it in a small lifeboat. It is, of course, the Drake Passage, connecting the southern tip of the South American continent with the northernmost point of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Once the preserve of explorers and sea dogs, the Drake is today a daunting challenge for an ever-increasing number of travelers to Antarctica – and not just because it takes up to 48 hours to cross it. For many, being able to boast of surviving the “Drake shake” is part of the attraction of going to the “white continent.”

But what causes those “Shakes,” which can see waves topping nearly 50 feet battering the ships? And how do sailors navigate the planet’s wildest waters?

For oceanographers, it turns out, the Drake is a fascinating place because of what’s going on under the surface of those thrashing waters. And for ship captains, it’s a challenge that needs to be approached with a healthy dose of fear.

The World’s Strongest Storms

The Drake Passage can see waves of up to 49 feet. Mike Hill/Stone RF/Getty Images

At around 600 miles wide and up to 6,000 meters (nearly four miles) deep, the Drake is objectively a vast body of water. To us, that is. To the planet as a whole, less so.

The Antarctic Peninsula, where tourists visit, isn’t even Antarctica proper. It’s a thinning peninsula, rotating northwards from the vast continent of Antarctica, and reaching towards the southern tip of South America – the two pointing towards each other, a bit like a tectonic version of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” in the Sistine Chapel.

That creates a pinch point effect, with the water being squeezed between the two land masses – the ocean is surging through the gap between the continents.

“It’s the only place in the world where those winds can push all around the globe without hitting land – and land tends to dampen storms,” says oceanographer Alexander Brearley, head of open oceans at the British Antarctic Survey.

Winds tend to blow west to east, he says – and the latitudes of 40 to 60 are notorious for strong winds. Hence their nicknames of the “roaring forties,” “furious fifties” and “screaming sixties” (Antarctica officially starts at 60 degrees).

But winds are slowed by landmass – which is why Atlantic storms tend to smash into Ireland and the UK (as they did, causing havoc, with Storm Isha in January buffeting planes to entirely different countries) and then weaken as they continue east to the European continent.

With no land to slow them down at the Drake’s latitude anywhere on the planet, winds can hurtle around the globe, gathering pace – and smashing into ships.

“In the middle of the Drake Passage the winds may have blown over thousands of kilometers to where you are,” says Brearley. “Kinetic energy is converted from wind into waves, and builds up storm waves.” Those can reach up to 15 meters, or 49 feet, he says. Although before you get too alarmed, know that the mean wave height on the Drake is rather less – four to five meters, or 13-16 feet. That’s still double what you’ll find in the Atlantic, by way of comparison.

And it’s not just the winds making the waters rough – the Drake is basically one big surge of water.

“The Southern Ocean is very stormy in general [but] in the Drake you’re really squeezing [the water] between the Antarctic and the southern hemisphere,” he adds. “That intensifies the storms as they come through.” He calls it a “funneling effect.”

Then there’s the speed at which the water is thrashing through. The Drake is part of the most voluminous ocean current in the world, with up to 5,300 million cubic feet flowing per second. Squeezed into the narrow passage, the current increases, traveling west to east. Brearley says that at surface level, that current is less perceptible – just a couple of knots – so you won’t really sense it onboard. “But it does mean you’ll travel a bit more slowly,” he says.

For oceanographers, he says, the Drake is “a fascinating place.”

It’s home to what he calls “underwater mountains” below the surface – and the enormous current squeezing through the (relatively) narrow passage causes waves to break against them underwater. These “internal waves,” as he calls them, create vortices which bring colder water from the depths of the ocean higher up – important for the planet’s climate.

“It’s not just turbulent at the surface, though obviously that’s what you feel the most – but it’s actually turbulent all the way through the water column,” says Brearley, who regularly crosses the Drake on a research ship. Does he get scared? “I don’t think I’ve ever been really fearful, but it can be very unpleasant in terms of how rough it is,” he says candidly.

Fear Breeds Fear

In 2010, tourist ship Clelia II declared an emergency after suffering engine failure in the Drake. Fiona Stewart, Garett McIntosh/AP

One other key thing that makes the Drake so scary: our fear of the Drake itself.

Brearley points out that until the Panama Canal opened in 1914, ships going from Europe to the west coast of the Americas had to dip round Cape Horn – the southern tip of South America – and then trundle up the Pacific coast.

“Let’s say you were shipping goods from western Europe to California. You either had to offload them in New York and do the journey across the US, or you had to go all the way around,” he says. It wasn’t just large cargo ships, either; passenger ships made the same route.

There’s even a monument at the tip of Cape Horn, in memorial of the more than 10,000 sailors who are believed to have died traveling through.

“The routes between the south of South Africa and Australia, or Australia or New Zealand to Antarctica, don’t really lie on any major shipping routes,” says Brearley. “The reason it’s been so feared over the centuries is because the Drake is where ships really have to go. Other parts [of the Southern Ocean] can be avoided.”

‘We Don’t Gamble’

Captain Stanislas Devorsine regularly crosses the Drake. Sue Flood/Ponant Photo Ambassador

Navigating the Drake is an extremely complex task that demands humility and a side of fear, says Captain Stanislas Devorsine, one of three captains of Le Commandant Charcot, a polar vessel of adventure cruise company Ponant.

“You have to have a healthy fear,” he says of the Drake. “It’s something that keeps you focused, alert, sensitive to the ship and the weather. You need to be aware that it can be dangerous – that it’s never routine.”

Devorsine made his Drake debut as a captain over 20 years ago, sailing an icebreaker full of scientists over to Antarctica for a research stint.

“We had very, very rough seas – more than 20 meter [66 feet] swells,” he says. “It was very windy, very rough.” Not that Ponant’s clients face anything like that. Devorsine is quick to point out that the comfort levels for a research ship – and the conditions it will sail in – are very different from those for a cruise.

“We are extremely cautious – the ocean is stronger than us,” he says. “We’re not able to go in terrible weather. We go in rough seas but always with a big safety margin. We’re not gambling.”

Even with that extra safety margin, though, he admits that crossing the Drake can be a hairy experience. “It can be very rough and very dangerous, so we take special care,” he says.

“We have to choose the best time to cross the Drake. We have to adapt our course – sometimes we don’t head in our final direction, we alter the course to have a better angle with the waves. We might slow down to leave a low pressure path ahead, or speed up to pass one before it arrives.”

The ‘Drake Shake’ and Broken Plates

Captains check the weather up to six times a day before departure to ensure a safe crossing. Jamie Lafferty

Of course, every time you get on a ship – whether it’s a simple ferry ride or a fancy cruise – the crew will already have meticulously planned the journey, checking everything from the weather to the tides and currents. But planning for a crossing of the Drake is on a whole new level.

Weather forecasting has improved in the two decades since Devorsine’s first ride, he says – and these days crew start planning the voyage while passengers are making their way to South America from all over the globe.

Sometimes they leave late; sometimes they head back early, to beat bad weather. Devorsine – who makes the return journey about six to eight times per year – estimates that the unusually calm “Drake lake” effect happens once in every 10 crossings, with particularly rough conditions (that “Drake shake”) once or twice in every 10 journeys.

Of course, he knows what’s in store long before the passengers reach the ship.

“We look ahead to have the best option to cross. Normally I look at the weather 10 days or a week before, just to have an idea of what it could be,” he says.

“Then I check the forecast once per day, then two or three days before departure I start looking at it twice per day. If it’s going to be a challenging passage you look every six hours. If you have to adjust your departure time, then you look at it very closely to be very accurate.”

His safety margin means that he’s calculating a route that will get you across not just alive, but also as comfortably as possible. Hearing an anecdote about broken crockery and furniture on another operator, he sighs, “That’s a bit too far for me.”

“Before you have any issue with a storm, you have to keep a comfortable ship,” he says. The safety margin is to be sure that the guests will enjoy being in Antarctica, and that we won’t turn around because we have a problem… like injured people.”

In extreme conditions, he orders extra weather advice from Ponant HQ, but if you’re imagining the staff on the bridge desperately radioing for advice as waves batter the ship, think again.

“It would never happen to be in the middle of the Drake with bad conditions, needing assistance from headquarters because it would mean we didn’t have any safety margin before departure. When we cross and it’s going to be challenging, we have a big safety margin and the ship is not at all in danger.”

They are in contact with headquarters with high level satellite antennae throughout the crossing, with both satellite and radio backup if needed – Devorsine says he can’t imagine ever losing contact, whatever the weather.

Antarctica cruise: The last frontier for a big at-last luxury adventure

A Dangerous Thrill

Aurora Expeditions' Greg Mortimer ship has a patented bow to make a Drake crossing more stable. Tyson Mayr/Aurora Expeditions

Devorsine, who now spends 90% of his time sailing in polar waters, feels at home on the Drake. “When I was a little child, I read books about the maritime adventures of sailors and polar heroes,” he says. “I was attracted by tough things – I like challenges. This is why I followed the path to be able to sail in these areas.”

His first experience of the area was doing a “race around the world” in a sailboat as a youngster, heading south from his native France and rounding Cape Horn.

“It was my dream because it’s difficult, dangerous and challenging,” he says.

He’s not the only one. Some guests are drawn to Antarctica trips because of the tough journey. “I guess [they] are attracted by these areas [of the Southern Ocean] because it’s wild, it can be rough, and it’s a unique experience to go there,” he says.

Not everone’s a thrill-seeker though. As managing director of Mundy Adventures, an adventure travel agency, Edwina Lonsdale is dealing with a clientele already used to discomfort – yet she says crossing the Drake is a “conversation topic” during booking.

“it’s something we would raise to make sure people are completely aware of what they’re buying,” she says. “[Going to Antarctica] is a huge investment – you need to talk through every aspect and make sure nothing’s an absolute no.”

Lonsdale advises that passengers nervous of feeling sick should choose their ship carefully. In the past, vessels heading to Antarctica tended to be uncomfortable metal boxes built to take a heavy beating. But in recent years, companies have introduced more technically advanced vessels: like Le Commandant Charcot, which was the world’s first passenger vessel with a Polar Class 2 hull – meaning it can go deeper and further into the ice in polar regions – when it debuted in 2021.

Two of Aurora Expeditions’ ships, the Greg Mortimer and Sylvia Earle, use a patented inverted bow, designed to slide gently through the waves, reducing impact and vibration and improving stability, rather than “punching” through the water as a regular bow shape does, which makes the bow rock up and down.

Lonsdale says that the fancier the vessel and the offerings onboard, the more distractions you’ll have if bad weather hits. Newer boats often have more spacious rooms and bigger windows so that you can watch the horizon, which helps to lessen seasickness. If the budget allows, she says, book a suite – you won’t just get more space, you’ll (likely) have floor-to-ceiling windows, too.

But a word of advice – she recommends a careful selection not just of the right operator for you, but of the ship itself.

“Just because a company has a fleet with a very modern ship doesn’t mean the whole fleet will be like that,” she says.

‘Act Before You Start Spewing’

At Cape Horn there's a monument marking the 10,000 sailors thought to have died navigating the Drake. DreamPictures/Photodisc/Getty Images

So you’ve conquered your fears, booked your ticket and you’re about to set sail. Bad news: the captain is predicting the Drake shake. What to do?

Hopefully you’ve come prepared. Most ships have ginger candies on offer during bad weather, but bring your own, as well as any anti-seasickness medication you want to take. Some passengers swear by acupressure “seeds”: tiny spikes, attached to your ears with a sticking plaster, designed to stimulate acupuncture points. Some ships offer acupuncture onboard; alternatively you can get it done beforehand, since the seeds last for some time.

Devorsine’s top tips are to keep your eyes on the horizon, hold onto the handrail when walking around, be careful around doors, and “don’t jump out of bed.”

Jamie Lafferty, a photographer who leads excursions on Antarctic cruises, says that of his 30-odd crossings, “I’ve had one where it felt like I was going to fall out of bed and that was the second time, way back in 2010 when there was a lot more guesswork involved. Crossing the Drake Passage is much, much more benign than it used to be thanks to the accuracy of modern forecasting models and stabilizers on more modern cruise ships. This doesn’t mean it’ll be smooth, but it’s vastly less chaotic and unpredictable than it used to be.”

His top tip? “Take seasickness medication before heading out into open sea – once you start spewing, tablets aren’t going to be any use.”

Warren Cairns, senior researcher at the Institute of Polar Sciences of the National Research Council of Italy, has a bit of extra help.

“The only thing that works for me is going to the ship’s medic for a scopolamine patch,” he says. “It’s so rough, normal seasickness pills are just to get me to the infirmary.” Although he has it worse than the average tourist – on trips to Antarctica, their research ships have to pause for hours to take samples. “The waves come from all sorts of directions as the thrusters keep it in place,” he says. “When you’re underway it’s a much more regular motion.”

Lonsdale says it’s important not to fight it if you feel ill: “Just go to bed.” But equally, she says, don’t expect it: “It may be calm. You may not feel ill.”

People suffer differently from seasickness she says. “The Pacific has very long, slow swells, Channel crossings [between the UK and France] have quite a bouncy experience. Lots of people say crossing the Drake in very rough weather is uneven enough to not make them ill at all.” On that plate-smashing crossing, for example, this reporter – who was watching 40-foot waves from the observation deck – never got sick.

Remember that however it feels, you’re safe. “There’s an extraordinary level of safety in the build of those ships doing this,” says Lonsdale. Add in the safety margins that the likes of Devorsine build in, and you’re in uncomfortable, but not dangerous, territory.

And if all else fails, remember why you’re there.

“The motivation and excitement to discover those latitudes is very important to fight the seasickness,” says Devorsine. Lonsdale agrees.

“If you were going to the moon, you’d expect the journey to be uncomfortable but it’d be worth it,” she says. “You just have to think, ‘This is what I need to get from one world to another.’”

[aardvarks-and-bats]

I went to a series of talks on polar sciences and it was freaking ace! There was a media diver from Frozen Planet 2 who showed some footage of diving with re breathers with the Wedel seals. There were talks on glaciology, polar astronomy, and living and working in Antarctica! Also it was in an aquarium!

[bobnichollsart]

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

In 2005 I painted (acrylic paint on canvas) a second picture of Cretaceous Antarctica for the British Antarctic Survey. I've included the key so you can spot all the different species.

[antaripirate]

apologies for the random ass personal post but i graduated!!!!

having finished a degree feels incredibly fucking weird, but i now have a BSc. and the fact that i have a full scholarship for my research MSc in a couple of months is still insane to me. i’m also going to be working with the British Antarctic Survey which has always been a fucking dream for me.

anyway. successfully collected my first set of letters and i wanted to post something even though i’ll delete it.

this is a sappy ass post but i’m working class, disabled and first gen and so for me this is fucking huge.

anyway. i’m very proud of this :)

[80linesofvirgil]

My marine scientist partner is thinking of applying to the British Antarctic Survey. Thinking of opening Antarctica’s first bar: Love-craft Beer.

Better bar/cocktail name suggestions welcome :P

[mindblowingscience]

The loss of ice in one region of Antarctica last year likely resulted in none of the emperor penguin chicks surviving in four colonies, researchers reported Thursday. Emperor penguins hatch their eggs and raise their chicks on the ice that forms around the continent each Antarctic winter and melts in the summer months. Researchers used satellite imagery to look at breeding colonies in a region near Antarctica's Bellingshausen Sea. The images showed no ice was left there in December during the Southern Hemisphere's summer, as had occurred in 2021. "Overall, the five colonies have around 10,000 pairs of adults, so there would have been around 10,000 chicks. We think that 820 — the ones counted at Rothschild Island — may have survived, which means the death toll would have been over 9,000 chicks," said Peter Fretwell in a statement. Fretwell is a researcher at the British Antarctic Survey and co-author of the study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Continue Reading.

[female-malice]

Activists are distracted right now. War is a great time for corporations and industries globally to break environmental laws. It's a great time to approve illegal resource extraction projects and push through terrible land management policies. No one is looking right now. No one is marching or protesting or stopping traffic to warn humanity about the state of the Earth. The streets are occupied with the causes of various nations. The destruction of the world is buried under the chaos of nations in conflict with each other.

That's how it's done. That's how it's always been done.

The titanic is sinking and we're busy fighting over who gets to die in which cabin.

[dailyoverview]

Clouds blanket the coastline of South Georgia Island, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic Ocean. The island has no tree cover and is mountainous, with a central ridge and many fjords and bays along its coast. King Edward Point, a British Antarctic Survey research station, serves as the island’s capital and main settlement, with a population of about 20 people.

-54.400000°, -36.700000°

Source imagery: Maxar

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

A Winter Wanderer in the Weddell Sea

Since breaking from the Brunt Ice Shelf in May 2024, a large Antarctic iceberg spent the first few months of its existence mostly hemmed in by the surrounding glue-like sea ice, especially in the new rifts. But late in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, when sea ice began to fracture and drift, Iceberg A-83 made some progress in its seaward journey away from the shelf.

These false-color images show the iceberg on May 22, 2024 (top), shortly after the ice broke from the shelf, and on August 26, 2024 (bottom). Both images were acquired with the TIRS-2 (Thermal Infrared Sensor-2) on Landsat 9. They are part of a special expanded data collection program called LEAP (Landsat Extended Acquisitions of the Poles), which has been building year-round image records of glaciers, ice shelves, and sea ice around Antarctica, Greenland, and the Arctic Ocean since 2022.

Thermal images like these can help scientists keep watch over Earth’s polar areas, even when the Sun is below the horizon and visible images are unavailable. Winter in the region lasts from March through October, with 105 of these days engulfed in 24-hour darkness, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). The BAS operates the Halley VI Research Station, which is located on the remainder of the Brunt Ice Shelf.

Yellows and oranges indicate areas where surface temperatures are warmer, like open water or thin sea ice, while blues denote areas of colder temperatures, like the thicker ice of the iceberg and adjacent ice shelf. BAS has noted that winter air temperatures on the ice shelf are typically below minus 20 degrees Celsius (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit), with extreme lows of around minus 55°C (minus 67°F).

Note the relatively cool surface temperature of the ice-covered Weddell Sea in August compared to May. Sea ice around Antarctica reaches its maximum annual extent and thickness in late winter, usually around mid- to late-September. But even the relatively thick, late-winter sea ice can succumb to a large iceberg, in this case about the size of Portland, Oregon. According to Christopher Shuman, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County, glaciologist based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, cracks in the sea ice were evident in late July. The berg “clearly had broken from the ‘glue’ (mélange) in early August,” he said.

By September, the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 mission and the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite observed that several pieces had broken off from Iceberg A-83 as it spun and tried to pass the McDonald Ice Rumples, a submerged knob of bedrock that has served as a pinning point for part of the shelf. However, none of the broken iceberg pieces were large enough to be named by the U.S. National Ice Center (USNIC). As of September 13, Iceberg A-83 was the 15th largest of the 46 Antarctic icebergs being tracked by the USNIC.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

[kp777]

Excerpt:

Even significantly cutting planet-heating pollution now will have “limited power” to prevent warmer oceans from triggering the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, the report found.

“It appears that we may have lost control of the West Antarctic ice melting over the 21st century,” said Kaitlin Naughten, an ocean modeler with the British Antarctic Survey and lead author of the study.

[....]

The only way to really stop the rapid ice melting, Scambos said, would be not just to cut levels of planet-heating pollution but also to “remove some that has already built up.” This will be “a real challenge,” he said.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

12 June 2024

Wreck hunters have found the ship on which the famous polar explorer Ernest Shackleton made his final voyage.

The vessel, called "Quest," has been located on the seafloor off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.

Shackleton suffered a fatal heart attack on board on 5 January 1922 while trying to reach the Antarctic.

And although Quest continued in service until it sank in 1962, the earlier link with the explorer gives it great historic significance.

The British-Irish adventurer is celebrated for his exploits in Antarctica at a time when very few people had visited the frozen wilderness.

"His final voyage kind of ended that Heroic Age of Exploration, of polar exploration, certainly in the south," said renowned shipwreck hunter David Mearns, who directed the successful search operation.

"Afterwards, it was what you would call the scientific age. In the pantheon of polar ships, Quest is definitely an icon," he told BBC News.

The remains of the ship, a 38m-long schooner-rigged steamship, were discovered at the bottom of the Labrador Sea on Sunday by a team led by The Royal Canadian Geographical Society (RCGS).

Sonar equipment found it in 390m (1,280ft) of water. The wreck is sitting almost upright on a seafloor that has been scoured at some point in the past by the passing of icebergs.

The main mast is broken and hanging over the port side, but otherwise, the ship appears to be broadly intact.

Quest was being used by Norwegian sealers in its last days. Its sinking was caused by thick sea-ice, which pierced the hull and sent it to the deep.

The irony, of course, is this was the exact same damage inflicted on Shackleton's Endurance - the ship he used on his ill-fated Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914–1917.

Fortunately, the crews of both Endurance, in 1915, and Quest, in 1962, survived.

Indeed, many of the men who escaped the Endurance sinking signed up for Shackleton's last polar mission in 1921-1922, using Quest.

His original plan had been to explore the Arctic, north of Alaska, but when the Canadian government withdrew financial support, the expedition headed south in Quest to the Antarctic.

The new goal was to map Antarctic islands, collect specimens and look for places to install infrastructure, such as weather stations.

Shackleton never made it, however, struck down by heart failure in the Port of Grytviken on the British Overseas Territory of South Georgia, the last stop before reaching the White Continent. He was just 47 years old.

After his death, Quest was involved in other important expeditions, including the 1930-31 British Arctic Air Route Expedition led by British explorer Gino Watkins, who himself tragically died aged 25 while exploring Greenland.

Quest was also employed in Arctic rescues and served in the Royal Canadian Navy during WWII, before being turned over to the sealers.

The RCGS team members carried out extensive research to find Quest's last resting place.

Information was gathered from ship's logs, navigation records, photographs, and documents from the inquiry into her loss.

The calculated sinking location in the Labrador Sea was pretty much spot on, although the exact co-ordinates are being held back for the time being.

A second visit to the wreck, possibly later this year, will do a more complete investigation.

"Right now, we don't intend to touch the wreck. It actually lies in an already protected area for wildlife, so nobody should be touching it," associate search director Antoine Normandin said.

"But we do hope to go back and photograph it with a remotely operated vehicle, to really understand its state."

Alexandra Shackleton is the explorer's granddaughter and was patron to the RCGS survey.

"I was thrilled, really excited to hear the news; I have relief and happiness and a huge admiration for the members of the team," she told BBC News.

"For me, this represents the last discovery in the Shackleton story. It completes the circle."

The explorer continues to spark interest more than a century after his death.

Hundreds of people visit his grave on South Georgia every year to pay their respects to the man known by his crews simply as "The Boss."

"Shackleton will live forever as one of the greatest explorers of all time, not just because of what he achieved in exploration but for the way he did it, and the way he looked after his men," said David Mearns.

"His story is timeless and will be told again and again; and I'm just one of many disciples who'll keep telling it for as long as I can."

—

Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton CVO OBE FRGS FRSGS (15 February 1874 – 5 January 1922) was an Anglo-Irish Antarctic explorer who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic.

He was one of the principal figures of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

[xtruss]

Why Are These Emperor Penguin Chicks Jumping From a 50-Foot Cliff?

The First-of-Its-Kind Footage, Taken in January 2024 Via Drone, Captures a Rare Event that May Become More Common as Sea Ice Declines and Penguins are Forced to Adapt.

— Photographs and Video By Bertie Gregory | By Rene Ebersole | April 11, 2024

Emperor penguin chicks jump off a 50-foot cliff to take their first swim in Atka Bay, Antarctica. Photographer Bertie Gregory used his drone's powerful zoom lens to maintain distance from the captivating scene.

Like a group of teenagers crowding at the top of a cliff, waiting to see if someone will be brave enough to jump into the lake first, hundreds of months-old emperor penguins gather at the top of an Antarctic ice shelf towering roughly 50 feet above the sea.

Motivated by hunger, the fledglings peer over the edge, as if considering whether they might survive a polar plunge from such a height.

Then one bird goes for it

For the first time, experts have filmed emperor penguin chicks leaping 50 feet off an Antarctic cliff. The incredible footage will appear in the series "Secrets of the Penguins," which will debut on Earth Day 2025 on National Geographic and Disney+.

Some of the onlookers crane their necks to watch it plummet and splash into the icy water below. Seconds later, the chick surfaces and swims away—off to fill its belly with fresh fish, krill, and squid. Gradually, other fledglings follow, tumbling and flapping wings built for traversing water, not air.

Filmmakers producing a documentary series called Secrets of the Penguins, which will debut on Earth Day 2025 on National Geographic and Disney+, captured the extraordinarily rare scene by drone in January in Atka Bay, on the edge of the Weddell Sea in West Antarctica. It’s the first video footage of emperor penguin chicks leaping from such a high cliff, according to scientists.

As climate change melts sea ice in Antarctica, more emperor penguin chicks are breeding on the permanent ice shelf—forcing them to jump from higher heights into the ocean.

“I cannot believe they caught it on film,” says Michelle LaRue, a conservation biologist based at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. LaRue, who did not witness the jump, had visited Atka Bay to consult on the film crew’s third year of documenting emperor penguin behavior, from egg laying to chick fledging.

Ordinarily, emperor penguins nest on free-floating sea ice that thaws and blows away each year, not on the ice shelf, which is firmly attached to the land. But lately, some colonies have been nesting on the shelf. Scientists theorize that the shift could be related to increasingly earlier seasonal thawing of the sea ice caused by climate change.

At about five months old, Emperor Penguin chicks began to shed their down and grow their adult feathers, preparing for a life spent partially at sea.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the world emperor penguin population, estimated to be about 500,000 birds, as near threatened due in large part to how climate change is impacting its icy realm.

In early January 2024, in the final weeks before the sea ice broke up at the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer, filmmakers spotted a group of chicks that LaRue thinks were likely raised on the ice shelf waddling north toward the cliff. Curious about where they were headed, the filmmakers dispatched a drone for a bird’s-eye view. Gradually, more chicks joined the dawdling group, growing in numbers until there were a couple hundred standing at the top of the bluff.

‘I’m Gonna Have To Go’

Gerald Kooyman, a research physiologist who has spent more than five decades studying emperor penguins in Antarctica, says he has only seen such an event once—more than 30 years ago.

“Drifting snow had formed a gently sloping ramp from the sea ice onto a grounded iceberg, and a flock of departing chicks had marched up the ramp onto the berg,” Kooyman writes in his book Journeys with Emperors, published in November 2023.

“They were stopped by a 20-meter [roughly 67-foot] cliff over a sea that was sometimes open water and other times crowded with ice floes.” Over the course of a couple days, almost 2,000 chicks assembled at the ledge.

“Finally, they started walking off the cliff,” writes Kooyman, an Emeritus Professor with the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

“Not jumping or leaping, just stepping out and falling head over heels, sometimes doing two flips before hitting the water with a resounding plop.”

Most of the fledglings survived the jump into the icy waters. The chick on the left that fell into a crevasse used its beak to climb out and leap the rest of the way.

This phenomenon is rare, say scientists who monitor penguins from satellites in space. Peter Fretwell, a British Antarctic Survey Scientist who has studied Satellite imagery of the Atka Bay emperor colony for several years, occasionally sees penguin tracks going north toward that cliff. He theorizes that the chicks in January may have followed one or two vagrant adults that “went the wrong way, basically.”

Juvenile emperors usually fledge from the sea ice, hopping just a couple feet into the ocean. But these fledglings found themselves in a tricky location for entering the water while likely feeling extremely hungry, the scientists say. Their parents had already gone to sea, sending the message that it’s time for them to fish for themselves, and the chicks had been sitting tight waiting for their sleek, waterproof adult feathers to grow in, replacing their down.

“When they get to this cliff face, they’re like, ‘Alright, I see the ocean and I need to get in there,’” LaRue says. “This does not look like a fun jump, but I guess I’m gonna have to go.”

Resilient Birds

While the scientists do not think the cliff-jumping incident was directly related to climate change warming Antarctica, Fretwell says the continuing decline of sea ice on the continent may force more emperors to breed on ice shelves, therefore making the behavior more common in the future.

Scientists have been concerned about the sudden decrease in Antarctic Sea ice since 2016 and the likely dire consequences for emperor penguins’ long-term survival.

“We estimate that we could lose the whole population by the end of the century,” Fretwell says. “It’s heartbreaking to think that the whole species may be gone if climate change continues on the path that it’s on at the moment.”

LaRue remains hopeful about the emperors’ ability to adapt, and she considers the recent high dive caught on film a testament to their hardiness.

“They’re incredibly resilient,” she says. “They have been around for millions of years; they’ve seen lots of different changes in their environment. It’s a question of how rapidly they’re able to deal with the changes that are happening—and how far they can be pushed.”

[bobnichollsart]

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

2006 was one of the worst years of my life, for a few non-work related reasons, but it wasn't great for palaeoart either. I spent the majority of my time painting murals in aquariums, which was challenging and fun (I worked with some amazing people), but it wasn't what I wanted to do career-wise. The palaeoart highlight was a third painting for the British Antarctic Survey, depicting Antarctica during the Cretaceous.

[stoportotouch]

looking at what jobs the british antarctic survey have going again and they're advertising for a steward on one of their research vessels. wheeze.