Bellingshausen Sea

Four of the five breeding sites near the Bellingshausen Sea studied likely had zero chicks that survived the breeding season.

The colonies in the Bellingshausen Sea —about 10,000 breeding pairs in total—represent just a small fraction of the total population, thought to be more than 250,000 breeding pairs.

Researchers used satellite imagery to look at breeding colonies in a region near Antarctica’s Bellingshausen Sea.

The birds faced their first regional disaster around the Bellingshausen Sea, located to the west of a long peninsula that stretches north from West Antarctica.

Around the Bellingshausen Sea in late 2022, images captured by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite looked very wrong.