Scientist Peter Fretwell, who works for the British Antarctic Survey, was busy studying sea ice loss. But as he pored over satellite images of Antarctica, he couldn’t help but notice small, brown stains amid the otherwise pristine blue and white ice. He immediately knew that he should investigate further as such stains in Antarctica typically mean only one thing: penguin poo.
He’d been looking at photos from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites when he made the initial guano discovery. Fretwell then used high-resolution images of the same location, captured by the Maxar WorldView-3 satellite, to confirm his hunch that penguins were indeed living there.
And they weren’t just any penguins, either - he discovered a previously unknown colony of emperor penguins, the tall, black-and-white birds with yellow ear patches. Scientists estimate that roughly 500 penguins are living at the site, the British Antarctic Survey announced last month.
With this newly discovered rookery, which is located at Verleger Point in West Antarctica, scientists have now identified 66 total emperor penguin colonies along the coast of the White Continent.
Satellites have helped researchers discover half of all known emperor penguin colonies.