In January 2016, Steven Emsley was finishing a season of studying penguin colonies near the Italian base Zuchelli station in Antarctica. With the summer approaching quickly and all the planned work completed, Dr. Emsley, an ornithologist at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington, did what a good scientist would do with a few extra days in the Antarctic: he went in search.
He had heard rumors of penguin songs on a rocky cape on the Scott Coast, but there were no reports of active settlements. Oddly, he arranged a helicopter flight to the area and looked around.
“Since Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Schuck Clayton discovered the area a hundred years ago and didn’t write about any penguins on this particular site, I didn’t expect to see much since I always wrote about penguins when I saw them,” he said.
And yet, Dr. Emsley knew immediately that when he arrived he had stumbled upon something interesting. “There were pebbles everywhere,” he recalled.
Although pebbles are found daily in other continents, it is rare to find them in abundance on dry land in Antarctica. The main exception is found in the Adele penguin colonies, as the birds build their nests to collect small stones from the shore.
The pebbles had gathered in the nests and had been scattered a little recently by the weather. Then Dr. Emsley saw Gino. There was a lot of dry penguin waste to create iconic white stains on nearby rocks. Then he found a penguin corpse.
The feathers are still intact and the flesh is barely rotten, Dr. Emsley was stunned.
“I remember thinking, wow, a penguin colony that even Shkkulton didn’t know about,” he said.
The shock gave way to more curiosity and led him to wonder what could possibly happen to the colony. Fascinated, he collected some fossils and took them back for carbon-dating analysis when the birds died.
With the date of death between 400,000 years ago, Dr. Emsley immediately realized that guanos, feathers, bones and pebbles had been locked under ice layers for centuries and the fact that the “freshly dead” penguin was in fact . Recently defrosted mummies that were swallowed up a long time ago by advancing on ice fields. Scott and Shack Clayton can be forgiven for not seeing this settlement, as it was hidden from view when there were explorers in the area.
The discovery paints a picture of a place that, after experiencing the periodical Adoli Penguin business thousands of years later, found that the business came to an abrupt end about 800 years ago.
Dr. Emsley speculated in Geological Geology. Where he reported his conclusion in mid-September, that the cooling temperatures would create a kind of sea ice on the coast that survives well into the summer months. Known as “fast ice” because it “makes the beach” faster, this sea ice makes it very difficult for penguins to reach the beach and prevent them from migrating wherever it happens.
He said he thinks the ice is forcing the colony to leave, but he also suggested that warming temperatures could change things in the coming years.
As Antarctic ice melts and sea levels rise, established penguin colonies are being forced to disperse to new locations. Dr. Emsley suggests that penguins may return to sites like this later.
“They need gravel for their structure, so they are very attractive in finding gravel already at this place,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see them make this place their home again in the near future.”
Other penguin experts agree.
“We’ve always thought that Eddie Lee Penguin carries a huge impetus to return to the structures of places born years later, but, as we’ve been shown recently due to some catastrophic snowfalls, they’re really pretty acceptable,” said penguin ecologist David Enley. Ecological consulting firm H.T. Harvey & Associates.
“We’ve seen Adelis roam the shores in a small community and if they find a promising looking site like this they’ll make it their home.”
