Climate change drowns thousands of Emperor Penguin chicks after fast ice torn from the continent.

The second largest Emperor Penguin breeding ground is located at Halley Bay,  which faces the heavily crevassed Dawson-Lambton Glacier in Antarctica.

Immediately to the west is the Brunt Ice Shelf and it is poised to calve an iceberg the size of Delaware at any time. I shared the research from The European Union Earth Observation Programme here.

Most of the action on #BruntIceShelf is now happening in the south, where Chasm-1's tail is progressing toward the ocean. It wouldn’t surprise me if - sometime soon - this part breaks off first, which could then trigger the disintegration of the northern part. pic.twitter.com/jV6l3bREWp

The Brunt Ice Shelf is breaking naturally, and not by climate change according to researchers.

If anything remains of the breeding colony, it will be destroyed by the cracking ice shelf anyway.

Halley Bay penguin colony collapse is related to the warming of ocean water which has melted the sea ice. As a result, massive breaking waves slam into the ice, dislodging the fast ice from the land and disintegrating the colony. A worrisome omen for the Antarctic wildlife.

This #Sentinel2 image shows the location of the devastated Halley Bay colony, and the colony to which many adults have now fled - Dawson-Lambton. Note: Halley Bay was probably doomed anyway because of the iceberg calving event that's about to take place on the #BruntIceShelfpic.twitter.com/SY1n3m7mIi

Here's a clip detailing how penguin poo seen from orbit allows scientists to identify new colonies and count penguins by estimating the size of their huddles. #guanohttps://t.co/fVWTrhrw0W

It is important to note that only the chicks were lost. The others were able to locate to new breeding grounds.

The Telegraph writes:

For the past three years, virtually nothing has hatched at Antarctica’s second-biggest breeding grounds for emperor penguins and the start of this year is looking just as bleak, a new study found.

Usually, 15,000 to 24,000 breeding pairs of emperor penguins flock yearly to a breeding site at Halley Bay, considered a safe place that should stay cold this century despite global warming. But almost none have been there since 2016, according to a study in Wednesday’s Antarctic Science.

The breeding pair population has increased significantly at a nearby breeding ground, but the study’s author said it is nowhere near the amount missing at Halley Bay.

"We’ve never seen a breeding failure on a scale like this in 60 years," said study author Phil Trathan, head of conservation biology at the British Antarctic Survey. "It’s unusual to have a complete breeding failure in such a big colony."

Normally about 8% of the world’s emperor penguin population breeds at Halley Bay, Trathan said.

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Scientists blame the sharp decline on climate and weather conditions that break apart the "fast ice" - sea ice that’s connected to the land - where the emperor penguins stay to breed. They incubate their eggs and tend to their chicks - one per pair - on ice. After breeding and tending to the chicks, the penguins move to open sea.

In 2016 and 2017, there was no breeding in Halley Bay and last year there was just a bit, the study found.

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The nearby Dawson-Lambton breeding area, which had been home to a couple of thousand pairs, increased to 11,117 pairs in 2017 and 14,612 pairs in 2018, the study said.

While that’s encouraging, it doesn’t make up for all that was lost at Halley Bay, Trathan said. "Not everybody has gone to Dawson Lambton yet," he said.

What’s troubling isn’t that part of the colony has moved to Dawson-Lambton, it is that scientists thought of Halley Bay as a climate change refuge in one of the coldest areas of the continent "where in the future you expect to always have emperors," Trathan said.

The fingerprints of the 2016 #ElNino and the Southern Annular Mode are all over this particular event. The edge of the #BruntIceShelf has been re-sculpted to remove the creeks that fostered the fast sea-ice favoured by emperors. https://t.co/DUoKArbMU2@PeterTFretwell

Watch the video below. 

Antarctica: What happened to Halley Bay's penguins?

Peter Fretwell counts penguins from space using satellites. He's watched the collapse of an emperor colony on the edge of Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf. He spoke with our science correspondent Jonathan Amos.