Previously unknown colonies of emperor penguins have been found in new satellite images from Antarctica.
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00:00 The Antarctic coastline is a very dynamic environment. Ice shoals and glaciers carve
00:05 or break off and occasionally that means that the emperor penguin colonies have to move.
00:10 That stands them in good stead with climate change really because it means they aren't
00:15 static. They won't just stay there whatever. We think that the majority of them will try to find
00:23 new ice, better ice and more stable ice if the ice on which they're breeding becomes unsuitable.
00:32 So this was an opportunistic survey really done as part of our monitoring and because we're
00:40 monitoring emperor penguins every year now to see how they're moving and how they're
00:44 coping with climate change and during that survey looking for the movements of colonies we managed
00:52 to find these four new breeding sites which have always existed but we've never spotted them before.
00:58 The importance of this is twofold. It does increase the population slightly but also it
01:06 shows us the colonies which where the colonies are because there are a discrete number of colonies
01:16 around Antarctica and as the penguins move to find new ice they may start going to these new colonies
01:23 so we need to know where they're going to move to because they rarely form brand new colonies.
01:28 They usually move to pre-existing colonies so it's very important to know where all the colonies are
01:33 so we can track their movements over time. So all of these colonies have been found in the last
01:38 calendar year or so although we can go back in the archive and see that they have been there
01:45 for some time so they're not colonies that have just occurred they've always been there it's just
01:50 that we haven't discovered them yet. They're newly discovered not new colonies. For this paper we've
01:57 used something called the Sentinel 2 satellite which has got a resolution of about 10 meters and
02:01 we don't usually see the penguins we just see the brown stains on the ice. I don't probably need to
02:06 tell you what the brown stain is but it's very visible on the white ice there's nothing else
02:11 that's brown on the ice so we can see those stains and we can see and then when we've used
02:16 that's a sort of medium resolution satellite when we identify the white brown stains then we can
02:21 send the really high resolution satellites which don't take imagery all the time you have to task
02:27 them you have to ask them to take an image but once we've found those sites we can task those
02:32 satellites to take an image and confirm that it's called a penguin colony and when we get that that's
02:38 a resolution of maybe 30 centimeters about the A4 sheet of paper and we can see all the penguins
02:45 individually on those high resolution images so we can confirm it's emperor penguins. They don't
02:50 like to stay in one spot too long because they've got to rehydrate by eating snow so they'll move
02:56 and their stains will continually get larger over the course of the season sometimes many
03:01 kilometers wide and so although you may only have a huddle of penguins which is
03:06 100 feet you might have a mile of brown stain behind them. We do forecast changing sea ice
03:16 conditions ocean and atmospheric warming which will impact the sea ice and make much of it
03:22 unsuitable habitat for emperor penguins so this is going to happen more often in the coming years in
03:28 the coming decades as we monitor it we're already seeing sea ice change quite dramatically around
03:33 Antarctica over the last five or six years which isn't good for emperor penguins. We can monitor
03:39 it, we can't put the sea ice back, we can't build something for them, that's not the way that it
03:44 works so it's really just seeing how they adapt and changing our own behavior really because it's
03:50 not the emperor penguins that need to adapt and change it's us that need to adapt and change
03:58 to stop the world warming up because the emperor penguin is one species and this is going to happen
04:03 to many many other species as well.