day 6 antarctica

Report: 6

This report filed Jan. 19, 1999

Ah, the penguins.

Many friends and colleagues have been emailing me, wondering if we'd ever get to see penguins. We were wondering too, especially after setting two helicopters down with lots of television gear on a remote, windy plateau high above the coast in a small corner of Antarctica.

It's called Cape Crozier. David Ainley was our host. And everyone pitched in to haul hundreds of pounds of gear down an icy slope for about a mile, including the Chief Science Representative of the National Science Foundation, Roberta Marinelli. The NSF is facilitating our trip. Even she had never been to this wondrous place in the world. Few humans have.

What has been here for eons are the Adelie penguins. There are more than 180,000 mating pairs of penguins, plus their chicks, plus non-mating penguins at this site. All in all, you can find more than 400,000 penguins over a four-kilometer stretch of beach—all squawking and voicing mating calls all at once. They even growl and bark like dogs if you get too close for their comfort. We ran into a few like that and backed off immediately, as per the terms of our permit to come here.

But the vast majority of them are simply too curious and fearless to feel threatened by humans. They will waddle right up to you, look you over, and waddle away. Then they may slide on their bellies on the ice, or go down to the water and jump in, filling those bellies with four or five pounds of fish and krill.

What does threaten the Adelie penguin population is clmate change. The fluctuations in warming temperatures in Antarctica has a huge impact on where the penguins live and how they eat. There has been a 30 percent drop in the birth rate at Cape Crozier this year alone. Dr. Ainley and his team are trying to find out if rapidly changing weather patterns, and big weather events like El Nino, are a factor.

Also, Antarctica is widely considered to be "the thermostat for the planet." If it warms up quickly, the heat conveyed by the ocean waters around it spreads to other parts of the globe as well. Scientists are keeping a watchful eye on the health and well-being of these little creatures. Some go as far as saying that their future might reflect our own.

But for now, most of the penguins we saw certainly seemed happy and healthy. And pretty cute, too.

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