Cape Bienvenue
Cape Bienvenue is a known penguin breeding site in the Wilkes Land, at 66°43'S 140°32'E. Adélie penguins have been recorded here.
Species recorded here
The sea around this site, 1979–2024
Averaged over the 28 ocean cells within 100 km, this site carries sea ice for a median of 300 days a year, peaking at a median 97.9% concentration. The fitted change is +8.2 days per decade, but it stops clearing its error bars once a level shift in 2010 is allowed for, so it is not quotable: a straight line is not a description of this series.
This site is the one the thinning kept here. 13 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 14 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 291 days, which is this site's 17th shortest season of 41 and below its own median of 300. 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.
This is one of the ten sites the 2010 iceberg event was found at. Scored blind on the change in summer sea ice from the 2001–10 ice years to the 2011–20 ones, it ranks 10th of 728: 14.4% before and 51.4% after, 3.2 times its own year-to-year spread. No summer trend is published here — the summer window here holds too little ice to fit anything — and the fuller story is on 729 sites, 56 places.
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.
Asked whether this is a trend or a step
Every fitted series on this site was made to nominate its own worst break year against a Monte Carlo null, with no event supplied. 1 of the figures published for this site came back flagged: the strongest is winter sea ice · 1988 onward, which breaks at 2011 — December 2010, when the iceberg B09B grounded in Commonwealth Bay. The fitted direction survives at all of them, so what is in doubt is the size rather than the sign.
| Measurement | Break | Plain | With one step | Step | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| winter sea ice · 1988 onward | 2011 | -2.37 | -0.80 | -4.07 ± 1.78 | same sign |
Slopes are per decade — points of concentration for the sea-ice windows, days for the dates and season lengths. How every series on this site was asked →
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.