Backer Islands
Backer Islands is a known penguin breeding site in the Marie Byrd Land, at 74°25'S 102°33'W. Adélie penguins have been recorded here.
Species recorded here
The sea around this site, 1979–2024
Averaged over the 25 ocean cells within 100 km, this site carries sea ice for a median of 337 days a year, peaking at a median 97.4% concentration. The fitted change is -6.4 ± 8.7 days per decade, which does not clear its own error bars: no detectable change, and that is the answer rather than a gap.
This site is the one the thinning kept here. 5 other known breeding sites lie within 200 km of it and were set aside with it, so this stretch of coast is counted once rather than 6 times — that is what being one of the 56 independent places means. It does not mean the site is alone. The 728 measurable sites in this archive thin to 56 places.
In the 2023 ice year — the last one this archive holds — the sea ice here lasted 296 days, which is this site's 11th shortest season of 41 and below its own median of 337. It was below the median at 657 of the 728 sites measured here and at 44 of the 56 independent places, which is the most widespread short season in the record: the whole archive is drawn in one frame.
Two limits. This is the sea around the site and never the fast ice on it — at 25 km that is invisible. And the archive ends 2024-12-31, so it is a climate record rather than a current reading.
Why there is no count on this page
Penguins are too small to resolve from orbit. What is visible is the guano stain a colony leaves on the ice, which is why counting from satellite is a colour problem rather than a counting problem — and it is not solved. Our own detector correlates at r = −0.16 against ground counts across eight colonies, which is no relationship at all. Until that is fixed, this site publishes locations and says nothing about numbers. A number we cannot defend would be worse than none.