Warming may lead to the extinction of emperor penguins

XIN, Nov. 11 (Xinhua) -- If timely action is not taken to curb the warming trend, the emperor penguins, the largest member of the existing penguin family, will be extinct by the end of the century, a new U.S. study found. The findings were published recently in the journal Global Change Biology.
Stephanie Genufrill, a seabird ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in the United States and lead author of the paper, said her institute's study of the future survival of emperor penguins combined with two computer models showed that if no action is taken to curb global warming, the number of emperor penguins in Antarctica is expected to decline by 86 percent by 2100, when the population of emperor penguins is unlikely to recover and the species will go extinct.
penguins are mainly distributed in the Antarctic continent and surrounding islands, fish and shrimp for food. Their fate is tied to sea ice: emperor penguins must live on sea ice off the coast of the Antarctic continent and close to the ocean for food. Their offspring also need stable sea ice, which cannot break from the birth of baby emperor penguins in April to the feathers in December. However, as the global climate warms, Antarctic sea ice will gradually disappear, and emperor penguins will lose their habitat, food sources and ability to hatch offspring.
two computer models from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a global climate model created by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, predict when and where sea ice will form under different climate scenarios. The second is a model of the penguin population itself, which calculates how changes in sea ice affect the life cycle, reproduction and death of emperor penguins.
researchers set three scenarios: a future global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius (the Paris Agreement target), 2 degrees Celsius, and 5-6 degrees Celsius (i.e., inaction to stop global warming). In the first case, by 2100, 5 per cent of the sea ice will disappear and the population of the emperor penguin community will be reduced by 19 per cent;