This roundup of The Conversation’s environment coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.

Through the winter months, emperor penguins lay their eggs, hatch their chicks, and huddle together for warmth. They do much of this in darkness, as the Antarctic sun disappears below the horizon for months on end.

That has made them surprisingly difficult to watch. Most satellite images rely on sunlight, so until recently scientists could track emperor penguin colonies only in the brighter months of the year.

But when when Grant Macdonald and his colleagues looked at images of Antarctic sea ice in winter, they spotted something unexpected: a “bright white splodge of pixels” moving across otherwise dark, smooth ice.

It turned out to be a penguin colony.

Macdonald, a geographer at Durham University, and his team soon identified several other colonies, and confirmed their findings with satellite images taken when the sun returned in September. For them, this new knowledge of what a penguin colony looks like from space, in the dark, opened an “exciting opportunity” to track them “throughout the whole breeding cycle”, using years of accumulated satellite images.

One colony particularly surprised them: penguins in Atka Bay repeatedly moved onto glacier ice each winter even though their preferred sea ice was still stable.

How much ice........

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