Emperor penguin populations declining faster than expected
What they found was "probably about 50-percent worse" than even the most pessimistic estimate of current populations using computer modelling, said Peter Fretwell, who tracks wildlife from space at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
Researchers know that climate change is driving the losses but the speed of the declines is a particular cause for alarm.
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications: Earth & Environment, found that numbers declined 22 percent in the 15 years to 2024 for the colonies monitored.
This compares with an earlier estimate of a 9.5-percent reduction across Antarctica as a whole between 2009 and 2018.
Warming is thinning and destabilising the ice under the penguins' feet in their breeding grounds.
In recent years some colonies have lost all their chicks because the ice has given way beneath them, plunging hatchlings into the sea before they were old enough to cope with the freezing ocean.
Fretwell said the new research suggests penguin numbers have been declining since the monitoring began in 2009.
That is even before global warming was having a major impact on the sea ice, which forms over open water adjacent to land in the region.
But he said the culprit is still likely to be climate change, with warming driving other challenges for the penguins, such as higher rainfall or increasing encroachment from predators.
"Emperor penguins are probably the most clear-cut example of where climate change is really showing its effect," Fretwell told AFP.
"There's no fishing. There's no habitat destruction. There's no pollution which is causing their populations to decline.
"It's just the temperatures in the ice on which they breed and live, and that's really climate change."
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