Antarctica might have just got a bit more crowded, at least on paper. Eight previously unknown emperor penguin colonies have been identified by a team from the British Antarctic Survey, using images from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2, a satellite mission run for the European Commission’s Copernicus program. The study, published in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation in August 2020, also confirmed three other colonies that scientists had long suspected but never been able to prove. Together, these findings brought the number of currently active emperor-penguin colonies to 61, a rise of nearly 20 percent, even though 65 sites have been recorded across the species' history, since a handful of older ones are no longer occupied.
