What If Gone

Species → Emperor Penguin

Emperor Penguin

Aptenodytes forsteri

595,000 adults (2026)
Extinction risk Endangered
Marine environmentClimate changeCatastrophic declineUmbrella species
Emperor Penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri)
Photo: Ian Duffy, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

What if it disappeared?

Impact High
Bellingshausen Sea

Four of the five colonies monitored by satellite in the Bellingshausen Sea suffered total breeding failure in 2022 — not a single chick survived — after a 100% loss of sea ice in November, before the young could complete fledging.

Documented
Detail

Fretwell, P.T., Boutet, A. et Ratcliffe, N. (2023). Record low 2022 Antarctic sea ice led to catastrophic breeding failure of emperor penguins. Communications Earth & Environment, 4, 273.

The authors used Sentinel-2 satellite imagery to track penguin presence at five colonies between 2018 and 2022 — Rothschild Island, Verdi Inlet, Smyley Island, Bryan Coast, and Pfrogner Point. Only the Rothschild Island colony achieved successful fledging that year; the other four were abandoned after the early ice breakup — an event the authors describe as unprecedented at this scale in a single season.

By 2100, current emissions scenario

If greenhouse gas emissions continue on their current trajectory, 98% of emperor penguin colonies could have disappeared by 2100 — a decline that would stay slow until around 2040, before accelerating sharply once sea ice coverage drops below a threshold viable for breeding.

Extrapolated
Detail

Jenouvrier, S. et al. (2021). The call of the emperor penguin: Legal responses to species threatened by climate change. Global Change Biology, 27(20), 5008–5029.

The study combines multiple climate and ecological models to capture the uncertainty inherent to each, rather than relying on a single projection — a method designed to inform legal protection decisions for the species, notably in the United States, where it contributed to recognizing climate change as a direct threat justifying listing under the Endangered Species Act.

What's missing to confirm it: Year-by-year confirmation that the actual pace of decline follows the projected trajectory rather than another one, since the acceleration predicted around 2040 has not yet been observable in the field.

Not measured to date

The emperor penguin is a link in the Antarctic food chain — a predator of krill and fish, an occasional prey item for seals and orcas — but no study measures what its disappearance would change for those populations: available literature documents the species' own decline, not its functional role in the ecosystem.

Insufficient

Documentation

Last verified: August 14, 2026