The emperor penguin - caring parent, extreme survivor and unwitting movie-star - could be marching to extinction by the turn of the next century. In its Antarctic home, the penguins frequently have to deal with prolonged bouts of starvation, frosty temperatures of -40 degrees Celsius, and biting polar winds that blow at 90 miles per hour. And yet this icy environment that so brutally tests the penguins' endurance is also critical to their survival. This is a species that depends on sea ice for breeding and feeding.
So what will happen to the emperor penguin as Antarctica's sea ice shrinks, as it assuredly will in the face of a warming globe? Stephanie Jenouvrier from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have tried to answer that question by combining the forty years of census data on a specific emperor colony with the latest models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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