Australia is planning to build Antarctica’s biggest infrastructure project: a new airport and runway that would increase the human footprint in the world’s greatest wilderness by an estimated 40%. The mega-scheme is likely to involve blasting petrel rookeries, disturbing penguin colonies and encasing a stretch of the wilderness in more than 115,000 tonnes of concrete. […]
Colonies of chinstrap penguins have fallen by more than half across islands in Antarctica, prompting scientific concern that “something is broken” in the world’s wildest ecosystem. After more than a month counting chicks in the South Shetland Islands, researchers suspect global heating is behind the sharp fall in numbers of the distinctive birds, which get […]
Scientists haven’t visited the Île aux Cochons, an island in the southern Indian Ocean, since 1982 when it had the distinction of being home to the world’s largest colony of king penguins, and the second largest colony of all penguins. At the time, there were estimate to be 500,000 breeding pairs, and over two million […]