Science News23%
Emperor penguin chicks like these starved. An iceberg may be the cause 32%
By Melissa Hobson18%
8/4/2026, 6:00:00 AM
Topics: Animals, Climate Change, Ecology, Environmental Science, Marine Biology, Ornithology, Polar Regions
Keywords: Penguin, Chicks, Starved, Iceberg, Cause, Colony, Antarctica, Breeding Season, Climate Change, Ice Melt
BS Summary: This article contains 18 faulty reasoning types, including Pessimism Bias, Biased Writer Voice, and Anchoring Bias, with Post Hoc (False Cause) as the most egregious example at 22% saturation with 108 hits. Analysis detected 726 faulty-reasoning hits from 490 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.3% and a BS Rank of 32% (18,439 of 26,881 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 68.60% of the article peer group.
An emperor penguin colony in Antarctica had a run-in with a grounded iceberg that may have led to a disastrous breeding season.
On Coulman Island, which is home to one ofThe emperor penguin colony in Antarctica saw a massive decline in chicks in 2025.
The contours of a nearby grounded iceberg may have been the cause. the largest emperor penguin colonies on the planet, surviving chick counts declined by 69 percent in 2025 compared with the previous year.
This may have been due to the sneaky shape of an iceberg grounding nearby, scientists report July 23 in Communications Earth & Environment.
The iceberg may have delayed the birds' return from their foraging grounds with food for their young.
When emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri) chicks hatch, the parents take turns crossing the sea ice to bring back food from the ocean for their babies.
When penguins returned in 2025, they climbed the iceberg until reaching a steep, unsurpassable cliff.
By the time they waddled back down and around the berg, their chicks may have starved.
“The shape of the iceberg itself trapped adult penguins as they were returning to the colony from the sea,” says Michael Polito, a marine biologist at University of California, Santa Cruz who was not involved in the work.
Polar researcher Jeong-Hoon Kim and colleagues counted 6,658 live chicks from 2025 aerial photos — 69 percent fewer than the 21,242 observed in 2024.
The pictures also revealed something strange.
“Large numbers of adult penguins were on and along the grounded iceberg,” Kim says.
Using aerial photos and satellite imagery, the researchers visualized the iceberg and recreated its movements after it split off from a large ice shelf further south.
This revealed it grounded just north of Coulman Island in July 2025 and stayed there until early January 2026 — disrupting the penguins’ path for much of the breeding season.
The shortest distance between the colony and open water increased from roughly 9.3 kilometers in 2024 to 14.9 kilometers in 2025, says Kim, of the Korea Polar Research Institute in Incheon.
Furthermore, the iceberg had a gentle slope that may have lured unsuspecting penguins up from the sea before facing a 20-meter drop.
The 3-D reconstruction of the iceberg's contours is a unique feature of this study, Polito says.
Both Kim and Polito highlight that, while this one-off event had a concerning impact, the iceberg has now passed by so future breeding seasons could return to normal.
However, as climate change causes Antarctic ice to melt, ice shelves may become weaker.
This “could increase the frequency in which large icebergs like this break off, drift away and impact penguin colonies,” Polito says.
“It was certainly a sobering experience,” Kim says.
“I had always hoped we would never see something like this at one of the colonies we monitor.
It is something I will not easily forget.”
Speakers
3speakers25%attributed speech367writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageMichael Polito
38 attributed words31% of attributed speech86% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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