Cape Darlington
Cape Darlington is a known penguin breeding site in the Palmer Land, at 71°53'S 60°08'W. Emperor penguins have been recorded here. Emperors breed on sea ice rather than land, which makes this one of the sites whose very surface disappears in a bad ice year. The sea around it has gained ice at 0.35 points a decade since 1979 — 2.3 times its own standard error.
Species recorded here
The sea ice around this colony, 1979–2024
Averaged over 24 ocean cells within 100 km, the April–November sea-ice concentration here has moved +0.35 ± 0.31 points per decade — fitted 96% in 1979 to 97% in 2024. That is a real gain: the slope is more than twice its own standard error above zero. Most emperor colonies are in this group, which is not the story usually told about them. Over the fledging window it reads +0.44 ± 1.14.
Two limits, and both matter. First, this is not the fast ice the birds breed on. At 25 km the land-attached ice emperors breed on is narrower than one cell and cannot be resolved. This is the sea around the colony, not the platform under it. Second, the archive ends 2024-12-31 — it is a climate record, not a current reading, and the live sea-ice figure on the wire is a different product entirely.
Is this an independent measurement?
This site is the one the thinning kept here. 1 other known breeding site lies within 200 km of it and was set aside with it, so this stretch of coast is counted once rather than 2 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 365 days, which is this site's 32nd shortest season of 41 and above its own median of 365. 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.
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.