This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: With their charming waddles, heat-conserving huddles and tuxedo-like plumage, emperor penguins are among the world's most recognizable animals. Recent satellite surveys estimate that hundreds of thousands of the flightless birds live in 66 colonies spread around Antarctica's inaccessible, frozen coastlines.
But those numbers could fall in the coming decades because emperor penguins rely on landfast (or fast) ice—a type of sea ice attached to the shoreline—to breed, raise chicks and molt. While Antarctic sea ice remained relatively stable between the late 1970s and 2015, it has been declining since 2016, and climate projections suggest that trend will continue. How landfast ice is faring remains poorly understood and is an active area of study.
However, one study suggests that it has declined in West Antarctica and the Weddell Sea in recent decades even as it has trended upward in the Bellingshausen Sea and East Antarctica. Meanwhile, some models project that emperor penguins could disappear by 2100 as their habitats become inhospitable. Fish and Wildlife Service listed emperor penguins as threatened in 2022, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature classified them as endangered in 2026.
After Antarctic sea ice cover hit a record low in 2022, British Antarctic Survey researchers reported "catastrophic" breeding failures among Bellingshausen Sea colonies. However, new research based on decades of observations from NASA–USGS Landsat satellites offers some hope, underscoring that many colonies have persisted for decades and that emperor penguins may be more flexible about where they breed than previously thought. Except for a few well-studied colonies, scientists have known little about how long many emperor penguin colonies have existed, how their populations have changed or how they have responded to past disruptions in landfast sea ice.
"There's little baseline information for what's 'normal' for most of these colonies," said Michelle LaRue, a wildlife ecologist at the University of Canterbury. That's made projecting future population levels a challenge. Two studies published in 2026 used decades of Landsat observations to start filling gaps in understanding.
Landsat cannot resolve individual penguins, but researchers identify colonies from the guano stains that accumulate where thousands of birds congregate on the ice. The studies were published in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation and Antarctic Science. Using this technique, researchers at the University of Freiburg found that 18 colonies predate their initial identification by an average of 17 years.
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