Snow Hill Emperor Penguin Expedition

A BAS science team has returned from Snow Hill emperor penguin colony, where they have conducted survey work, collected guano samples for DNA analysis and deployed the first tracking tags on emperor penguins in the Weddell Sea.

The project, funded by BAS, WWF and Antarctic Research Trust, accessed the colony in mid- November, using the helicopters from the cruise ship Ultramarine and is one of the first science expeditions to the Snow Hill colony in the emperor breeding season.

During two hectic days at the colony the team, consisting of Peter Fretwell, Norman Ratcliffe and Hugo Guimaro, took vertical aerial photos using UAVs to try to calibrate synchronous VHR satellite imagery, placed 15 GPS Argo tags on adult birds and collected 40 guano samples to study the diets of the birds using DNA sampling.

The Snow Hill Island emperor colony is the most northerly breeding site and regularly gets temperature much warmer that most other sites. It may act as an analog of the pressures many other sites will face with a warming Antarctica.

The birds are tracked in near real-time using the Argos system, and their locations shown on the following map.

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The following map shows animations of satellite tracked locations generated using moveVis.