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Antarctica's Royal Families

By Sandra Markle

I had spent three days on air-planes waiting for this moment--a smooth landing in Antarctica. The last leg of my journey from New Zealand took five hours. I was crammed in with 78 others on canvas seats in front of a mountain of boxes.

Stepping out of the C-141 cargo plane, I felt like Dorothy entering Oz. What an awesome sight! It was nearly midnight, but the daylight was dazzling, even through my sunglasses. The sun reflected off the white ice, which stretched as far as I could see. The air was so cold, breathing it stung my nose. On the horizon were ice-encrusted mountains, including one with steam drifting up from its peak-an active volcano! I was in an astonishing world of fire and ice.

I headed for McMurdo Station, the U.S. research facility that would be my home for the next nine months. I've been to Antarctica twice before to do research for books. Both visits were during the summer season, from December through March, when daylight can last 24 hours a day. Temperatures were sometimes above freezing, and the population at McMurdo averaged just over 1,000 people.

Now I'm one of 200 people who will keep the station going through the Antarctic winter, June through September. As the earth's bottom tilts away from the sun, there will be about 23 weeks without sunlight, and temperatures will sink as low as -65°F.

The day I landed, I spotted a lone emperor penguin near the ice runway. Just like me, the emperor penguins will have to work through the harshest winter on Earth.

Penguins on a Mission
Every year the emperor penguins come back to Antarctica from the frigid ocean to prepare for a remarkable season of birth. The Antarctic summer is long enough for other penguin species, such as Adélies and chinstraps, to raise their young. But it's too short for emperor chicks to mature. So the females lay their eggs at the very start of the Antarctic winter. Then they head out to sea to rest and eat, leaving the males the nine-week-long challenge of protecting the eggs during the coldest weather.

To keep an egg from freezing, the emperor dad balances it on top of his feet under a thick roll of feather-covered skin on his warm stomach! Males huddle together to keep warm as they incubate their eggs. The birds at the center of the huddle are pushed out by those around them in a slowly circling whirlpool of penguins. This lets all the emperor dads take turns being in the warmer center of the group. The birds must conserve energy, because they don't eat a thing while tending their eggs.

After nine weeks, the females return to find their mates and feed the fuzzy new chicks. That's when the males head for the ocean to feast and rest up.

The Emperors' New Clothes
Emperor penguins have a thick layer of fat under skin covered by a dense layer of woolly down. An outer layer of tiny feathers with a greasy waterproof coating grows over the down. Before the penguins head to breeding sites, they spend a month out of the ocean to molt-shed their old feathers and grow new ones.

Penguin researcher Gerald Kooyman has solved a longtime mystery: Where do the emperors go to molt? He attached radio transmitters to a dozen emperors. Then he traveled aboard a high-tech ship that could break through sea ice, tracking the penguins 745 miles to their secret molting site--ice shelves in the eastern Ross Sea. Molting is dangerous. If the birds move around much, their old feathers can fall out too quickly, leaving patches of bare skin exposed to the bitter cold.

I have a warm new coat too, and I'm ready for my own winter challenges. Come early springtime, near the end of my stay, I'll watch for these penguin parents--and the young they worked so hard to hatch--returning to the sea for a season of fish dinners.

Next: Top 5 Tallest Flightless Birds