A Changing World for Emperor Penguins
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Experts are analyzing decades of images from Landsat satellites for clues about how the iconic birds have responded to sea ice disruptions in the past.
With their charming waddles, heat-conserving huddles, and tuxedo-like plumage, emperor penguins are among the world's most recognizable animals. Recent satellite surveys estimate that hundreds of thousands of the flightless birds live in 66 colonies spread around Antarctica's inaccessible, frozen coastlines. But those numbers could fall in the coming decades because emperor penguins rely on landfast (or fast) ice —a type of sea ice attached to the shoreline—to breed, raise chicks, and molt .
While Antarctic sea ice remained relatively stable between the late 1970s and 2015, it has been declining since 2016 , and climate projections suggest that trend will continue. How landfast ice is faring remains poorly understood and is an active area of study. However, one study suggests that it has declined in West Antarctica and the Weddell Sea in recent decades even as it has trended upward in the Bellingshausen Sea and East Antarctica.
Meanwhile, some models project that emperor penguins could disappear by 2100 due to their habitats becoming inhospitable. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service listed emperor penguins as threatened in 2022, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature classified them as endangered in 2026.
After Antarctic sea ice cover hit a record low in 2022 , British Antarctic Survey researchers reported "catastrophic" breeding failures among Bellingshausen Sea colonies. However, new research, based on decades of observations from NASA-USGS Landsat satellites, offers some hope, underscoring that many colonies have persisted for decades and that emperor penguins may be more flexible about where they breed than previously thought.
Except for a few well-studied colonies, scientists have known little about how long many emperor penguin colonies have existed, how their populations have changed, or how they have responded to past disruptions in landfast sea ice.