Original subtitles

(wind blowing)

(soft dramatic music)

It is safe to say that the natural habitat

of a penguin, a skua, a snow petrel or a Weddell seal

is extremely inhospitable.

In Antarctica, temperatures can descend

to 40 degrees below Celsius,

and winds could blow at over 200 kilometers per hour.

(wind blowing)

An animal must orient itself in a setting

without points of reference to nourish and locate

its fellow creatures, its mate or its little ones.

(soft music)

To perpetuate its species, it must give birth to and raise

its offspring as fast as possible,

before the dreadful polar night of winter strikes.

(soft music)

(birds chirping)

Most animals that live in Antarctica exist

nowhere else on the planet.

How do they manage to survive in this white hell?

What is the secret behind their incredible resistance?

(penguins chirping)

In the field and laboratories the world over,

scientists are closely scrutinizing these unique beings

to decipher their strategies of adaptation.

(soft music)

They are also attempting to respond to a crucial question.

Will they be able to keep up

with increasingly rapid climate change?

At the dawn of the third millennium,

the Antarctica species have reached

a decisive turning point in their history.

To know them better has become essential,

to better predict their future.

(soft music)

(wind blowing)

The Antarctic content, a desert of ice

15,000 kilometers from Europe.

At the southern extremity of the planet.

The zone on the bottom right is Adelie Land,

a zone in Antarctica claimed by the French.

And on its coast, the small Archipelago of Point Geology

shelters a base for scientific research,

the Dumont d'Urville Station.

(soft music)

Every year in early November, what is known

as the summer campaign begins.

Several dozens of scientists land here

for four months of field research.

Do all the scanners work?

Even the little one works.

Okay, what we'll do is we'll take two of them.

Christophe Barbraud, researcher from the French

National Research Center, the CNRS,

and specialist in Antarctic fauna,

has also just arrived.

He wastes no time before preparing for missions

with a part of his crew.

So tomorrow, we'll start

taking systematic photos.

All the females, if we can get good shots of them.

In the Southern Hemisphere,

the seasons are inversed.

It is now the beginning of spring.

But the mercury stays well below zero,

minus 15 degrees Celsius today,

according to weather readings at the station.

(wind blowing)

It is impossible to go outside without being

wrapped in extreme cold-weather clothing.

And yet, animal life is teeming and abundant all around.

(soft music)

(birds calling)

Every year, between October and January, over 100,000

marine birds come to mate, lay eggs

and raise their chicks on these small rock ledges.

(birds calling)

(soft music)

The site is ideal for scientists.

The species they have come to study are all gathered

here within arm's reach.

In this territory, unique on Earth, the ice has always

protected animals from human greed.

They have never been hunted, so they do not fear

the presence of human beings.

(penguins chirping)

Every day, researchers can approach them to observe,

count and take samples from the animals

for their research needs.

(penguins chirping)

The Archipelago of Point Geology

is very particular, in that it's one of the rare sites

where one can find nearly all the species of birds

that nest in Antarctica.

One can truly speak of an oasis in the ice.

Everywhere around is ice.

Here we have the start of the ice cap,

the ice shelf, and the ice sheet behind us.

This is the only place within hundreds of kilometers

where the birds can build their nests and reproduce.

For the most part, they come here only for a short period.

They come for two or three months in the summer

to reproduce, then they go back out to sea.

So it's also a race against the clock in this oasis,

because they must accomplish their whole reproduction cycle,

mating rituals, coupling, laying of eggs, raising the young,

during the few months before the arrival of winter.

Otherwise, it's impossible to reproduce.

(wind blowing)

During the winter months, the polar night

envelops Antarctica and the weather

becomes even more extreme.

At Dumont d'Urville, temperatures drop

to 35 degrees below Celsius in June

and blizzards can howl at over 200 kilometers per hour.

(wind blowing)

During this period, Dumont d'Urville is emptied

of its inhabitants.

With one exception.

(wind blowing)

(soft music)

The renowned emperor penguins gave birth

to their young four months ago.

For them, the mating season takes place

in the heart of the Antarctic winter.

It is the only species on Earth

to adopt this mode of extreme life.

(soft music)

(penguins chirping)

Their secret, a series of adaptations allowing them

to maintain their body temperature by expending

as little energy as possible.

(soft music)

The first adaptation is body shape and size.

With its oval-shaped body, its small wings, beak and tail,

the emperor minimizes its surface contact with the outside

and thus heat loss.

(soft music)

But its best insulation is this,

the densest plumage of all bird species

known on the planet.

Their feathers are tightly knit, one against the other.

Spread out over four layers.

One can count up to 15 feathers per square centimeter.

These feathers are divided in two parts.

On the exterior side, a waterproof layer protects

the emperor from the attacking cold.

Underneath this layer, the feathers consist

of long and downy filaments.

When the penguin puffs out its plumage,

small bubbles are caught in contact with the skin,

thereby suppressing nearly all heat loss.

(soft music)

By multiplying shots, notably with an infrared detector,

Christophe can analyze in detail the efficiency

of the emperor's thermal protection.

So there, we see a column

of emperor penguins.

Shot with a thermal camera

that works with the infrared spectrum.

So for example, here on the first bird,

you can see the hotter colors, the red and the white,

which represent higher temperatures.

We can see that most of the losses occur

around the eye, the beak, the wings and also the feet.

But the rest of the body, though,

maintains its temperature to minimize heat loss.

(wind blowing)

But at the height of winter, when the winds

start to howl, this thermal insulation is not enough.

To resist, the emperors adopt a strategy

unique in the animal kingdom.

They abolish all social frontiers

and gather together in a compact group.

This is called a tortoise, in reference to the Roman army

that adopted this formation as a strong defensive tactic.

With the help of live-action footage,

German scientists model the waves

running through these tortoises.

(upbeat music)

They noticed that the penguins are always

in motion inside the formation,

keeping their backs exposed to the biting cold.

The movement of one penguin automatically

makes its neighbors move.

The animals maintain a distance of around two centimeters,

the optimal distance to keep warm

without compacting their plumage

and their own thermal barrier.

(upbeat music)

Inside the tortoise, temperatures can reach

as high as 35 degrees Celsius.

(wind blowing)

(soft music)

In Antarctica, extreme conditions concern not only

the inhabitants of the ice flow,

they also reach down into the depths.

Because the Antarctic Ocean is very salty,

water temperatures can reach 1.9 degrees below Celsius,

and near the coast, the ice shelf covers it

with an opaque veil for a good part of the year.

In spite of this hostile environment, here one finds

a rich and teeming biodiversity.

(soft music)

All species are perfectly adapted to their extreme habitat.

(soft music)

The bodily fluids of these invertebrates, contain exactly

the same amount of salt as the water surrounding them.

Consequently, they don't freeze when the temperature

of the water falls below zero.

Their internal liquids can only freeze

when the ocean also freezes.

(soft music)

This fish has adopted a strategy to resist the cold.

It belongs to a closely studied family

of species called notothenioids.

(soft music)

In the Antarctic, there are five families

and they all descended from a common ancestor

about maybe 30 million years ago.

The reason why they were able to diversity

in this Antarctic water is because when the Antarctic Ocean

got cold, a lot of the other fishes died out.

And so there's these wide open niches, right,

and the ancestor of the notothenioid somehow could

manage to survive that environmental change.

They were able to diversify and basically

fill up the whole ocean with these species.

And right now, we know that are are about 120-some species

in the Antarctic Ocean.

For many years, Christina Cheng has studied

the physiology of these strange Antarctic fish.

She works with her husband, Arthur DeVries,

who began to pierce through the mystery of their resistance

during this first stay on the White Continent

some 50 years ago.

(upbeat music)

My first trip to Antarctica, I noticed that one

deep-water species froze to death

in a tank at minus 1.9, the freezing point of seawater,

whereas a fish that was caught just beneath the surface

of the ice could survive quite well

despite lots of ice in the water.

So that sort of piqued my interest

in why one would freeze and the other not.

So then I began to dissect out the components

of the blood serum that were responsible for this

low freezing point, and I partially characterized

the antifreeze in those fishes,

and it turned out to be an antifreeze glycoprotein.

(soft music)

A protein that plays the role of antifreeze.

That is the secret behind the resistance

of this Antarctic fish.

As soon as an ice crystal forms in the animal's blood,

a group of proteins immediately forms around it.

This group composes a sort of solid net

around the crystal, and stops it from growing,

even if the temperature drops.

(soft music)

The presence of these proteins in their blood allows

the fish to lower their congelation point

to two degrees below Celsius.

It is not enough to freeze in the Antarctic Ocean,

which turns to ice at minus 1.9 degrees Celsius.

Among the notothenioids, certain species are gifted

with another astonishing particularity.

They are called ice fish.

In these specimens, the bronchia, the tongue and the organs

are completely white, not a trace of blood

which we are accustomed to.

(upbeat music)

In the course of their evolution, these fish rid their blood

of red cells and hemoglobin.

They capture oxygen in the water

directly through their skin.

When you don't have a lot of cells in the blood,

then the blood is thinner.

And so the viscosity decreases, and so the blood can flow

a lot more easily.

(soft music)

This thinner blood in constant motion

is harder to freeze than dense and viscous blood.

Yet another advantage these fish have

in their fight to resist extreme cold.

(soft music)

The ice fish and their cousins exist nowhere else

on the planet, but over the past few decades,

Antarctica has undergone noticeable modifications.

Temperatures have been rising on the surface,

as in the depths.

These highly adapted animals are particularly fragile

in the face of such significant changes.

(soft music)

Antarctic notothenioids are very cold adaptive.

And they are also very cold specialized.

So if you take these fishes, you warm them up,

at four degrees Celsius they are still

okay for some species.

At six degrees Celsius, they start to die off.

So if the ocean warms up, and if it warms very gradually,

very slowly, any organism is capable of adjusting

and evolving to a changing environment.

The fear is that if climate change intensifies very rapidly,

and the water warms up very, very quickly,

let's say in 100 years if it warms up to six degrees,

then the Antarctic notothenioids may not have enough

time to adjust and evolve to keep pace

and they might suffer a large extinction.

(soft music)

(wind blowing)

On land as well, the future of Antarctic

species is uncertain in the face of ongoing changes.

Scientists are scrutinizing them as closely as they can

in attempts to predict their evolution.

(dramatic music)

This one here, which one's that?

4340?

Today, the snow petrels nesting in the rock

ledges are being counted one by one

to help determine the general health of the colony.

(birds chirping)

Did you make a note of it?

Yeah.

With an egg.

That's nest 38.

The petrels return every year

to this vast rock to reproduce.

Their nests are marked with blue paint

to make them easier to see.

(soft music)

This year, the colony is in good shape.

About 1,000 couples have been counted on the archipelago.

(soft music)

Every year, the birds return to the exact

same place to reproduce.

What's more, they show proof of an incredible fidelity.

They stay together in the same nest

and made with the same partner.

But how do they locate their dwelling and their mate

among hundreds of virtually identical sites?

This exploit is made possible

by an ultra-strong sense of smell.

(soft music)

Above the beak, the animal is endowed

with large protuberant nostrils,

lined with numerous nerve cells capable of detecting odors.

(soft music)

The signals from the cells are sent to the animal's

olfactory bulbs, which are located in the front

part of the brain.

This zone occupies up to two-thirds of the cerebral mass,

which is more than any other species on the planet.

(soft music)

Finally, the information is transmitted from the cerebral

cortex to be interpreted and memorized.

(soft music)

In the white immensity of Antarctica, these birds can

thus detect a wide variety of different odors,

from those of their partner

to those of food concealed in ocean waters.

(birds calling)

Snow petrels, like many other subantarctic

birds, could have developed this enhanced sense

as an adaptation to particular conditions

which are lacking in visual or acoustic reference marks.

In general, even during the day, during hours with light

at sea, there are no trees, no rivers, no villages,

no spires, no roads that many other birds,

like carrier pigeons, for example,

can use to help guide them while navigating.

So the sense of smell can help them

in an environment lacking visual markers.

(soft music)

Francesco Bonadonna is a foremost expert

of smell in different species of petrel.

In his lab in the south of France, he and his team

study a field sampling of petrel feathers.

They are attempting to decipher the cocktail of molecules

that compose the olfactory identity of individuals.

With this machine, all components located on the surface

of the feathers are separated and analyzed one by one.

(soft music)

Birds have a large gland

at the base of their tail.

So if this is the tail of the bird, here is a gland

that is called uropygial gland.

This gland secretes waxes and oils that birds spread

on their wings during preening.

And we have found, through chemical studies,

that the base of the particular odor of a bird,

comes from this gland.

So we think that the waxes and oils spread on their wings

and altered by contact with bacteria or light,

produce the odor of the bird.

Since each bird produces different compositions of waxes

and oils, and the bacteria in the feathers can differ,

this combination of factors composes a unique odor

that identifies an individual and allows

for individual recognition.

Based on this research,

scientists think that this individual odor

is in part inscribed in their DNA

and transmitted from generation to generation.

Research continues to help better understand

the mechanisms and genes involved, but already

Francesco and this team suppose that this allows birds

to recognize members of their family

in order to avoid any risk of inbreeding.

The petrel's sense of small is far from having

revealed all its secrets.

But initial results point to exceptional abilities.

In Antarctica, the land and seascape of these white birds

is no doubt a far cry from what we as humans perceive.

(wind blowing)

Scientists believe that petrels orient themselves

with the help of an olfactory map,

a sort of land and seascape of odors

where they can discern food sources in ocean waters

or the presence of islands in the ice.

(wind blowing)

Approaching land, each rocky isle could also have

its particular odor according to the fauna residing there.

(birds calling)

From this multitude of olfactory data,

the bird could be able to detect the odor

of the isle sheltering its colony,

then localize its fellow creatures amidst other animals.

(birds calling)

A quick flight over its colony would then allow it

to pinpoint the unique olfactory signature of its mate.

(birds calling)

Every time we see a petrel land

to enter a nest, generally speaking, the widest margin

of error is 50 centimeters.

Which allows them to enter rapidly

because staying outside is dangerous.

It's dangerous there are winged predators like squaws

that do nothing at night other than roam around

at the foot of the colony and listen to the sounds

that indicate the presence of their food,

which consists of petrels.

(upbeat music)

Orienting itself on the immaculate ice sheet,

or in the depths of the ocean, is not only a challenge

for the snow petrel, all Antarctic species face

the same problem.

(upbeat music)

These placid animals sunbathing on the ice shelf

are Weddell seals.

They too, despite appearances, are aces

when it comes to orientation.

(seal vocalizing)

(upbeat music)

For this young seal, it is time for its first swim.

(soft dramatic music)

To orient itself underwater, and especially to find

holes in the ice through which to breathe,

the seal does not rely on its sense of smell

but probably on some kind of sixth sense.

According to experts, the seal may have the ability

to detect the Earth's magnetic field

and to use it as a compass.

(soft music)

The seal is also a champion diver.

It can stay in apnea for up to an hour

and descend as deep as 600 meters.

An indispensable skill in the Antarctic waters,

where food is scarce.

(soft music)

To accomplish this feat, the Weddell seal dives

with its lungs totally empty,

contrary to what humans do.

This avoids the transfer of gas toward the blood flow

and the formation of potentially fatal bubbles

as the seal resurfaces.

But the seal still possesses substantial oxygen reserves.

Its first reservoir, the blood,

three times more abundant than humans',

and containing twice the number of red blood cells.

(soft music)

The spleen also serves as a reserve of red blood cells,

which are progressively released into the blood

to enhance oxygenization.

The muscles are used as its last reserve.

Nearly 30% of the seal's oxygen is stored there,

then freed during the dive.

(soft music)

But to stay underwater this long,

the seal must also economize its oxygen.

Its body temperature decreases, and its heart rate lowers

to 15 beats per minute as opposed to the normal rate of 65.

(soft music)

During these dives, the Weddell seal expends hardly any

more oxygen than during its afternoon siesta.

(soft music)

On the surface, a group of seals is gathered around

a hole in the ice shelf, a nap in the sun well earned

after hours of diving.

A little over 300 individual seals come to Adelie Land

every year to mate and give birth to their little ones.

(pup whimpering)

Just a few minutes ago, at 15 degrees below Celsius,

this cute little baby seal was born,

120 centimeters and 25 kilos.

(pup vocalizing)

(wind blowing)

(soft music)

The mother's milk contains 15 times more lipids

than that of a human mother.

Thanks to this, the young seal quickly envelops itself

in a layer of protective fat.

When the baby is weaned in six weeks,

its weight will have quadrupled, and it will be ready

to survive alone in the icy ocean.

(soft music)

(penguins squawking)

(soft music)

Other residents of the ice flow also begin a new life cycle.

(chick squawking)

(soft music)

This noisy and animated colony is that of the most numerous

representatives of the local fauna, Adelie penguins.

For these young chicks, the countdown has started.

They have two months to prepare for their first swim,

before the ice shelf melts completely.

It's hard to imagine, these little birds seem so frail

and fragile under the feathers of their parents,

but in a little over 30 days,

this is what they will look like.

(penguins squawking)

Virtually adult sized, if disheveled teenagers.

(penguins squawking)

In the first 30 days of its life,

the chick will multiply its body mass 30 or 40 times,

which is considerable.

Imagine a newborn human who weighs three kilos at birth

weighing 90 kilos after just one month.

In a laboratory in Lyon, Damien Roussel

and his team study the physiology of the Adelie penguins,

in particular the growth of the chicks.

At birth, the challenges facing

the Adelie penguin are to reach adult size

and go out to sea, while at the same time

developing its abilities for thermogenesis,

which is to say the production of the heat in order

to resist both the Antarctic climate and the cold water

in which it must go to feed itself later.

The real challenge is that this growth and development

of autonomy, the production of heat, must take place

during the two months after hatching.

In such extreme polar cold, how do these

little birds manage to grow and to acquire

a sufficient thermal resistance in so little time?

To find out, Damien and his colleagues analyzed

minuscule samples of muscles taken while chicks were asleep.

(upbeat music)

On the left, a muscle of a penguin that has just been born.

On the right, the same muscle after one month of growth.

The flagrant change of color is a sign

of rapid physiological changes.

The researchers then isolated a particular molecule,

the growth hormone.

Their objective was to determine the evolution

of its quantity in the bodies of a chick from birth

until the age of two months.

After a few hours' wait, results begin

to show in the darkroom, like a developing photograph.

(upbeat music)

We can see things here.

Indeed.

Look.

I used three groups of penguins,

one day olds, 15 days old

and 60 days old.

60 days?

Yes.

When we measure this growth hormone

or its receptor, we find concentrations in the tissues

and blood that are extremely high at birth.

Then, during the first month, this level of concentration

diminishes over the first 15 days

to arrive at a minimum at 30 days

and then remain low until the molting

of the chick as it goes out to sea.

(penguins squawking)

Because of the abundance of this growth

hormone at birth, the chick starts growing

at a startling rate, nearly reaching its adult weight

after 30 days.

Then a shift occurs.

The growth hormone goes down to a very low level,

and the chick's growth ceases almost completely.

Its energy is then expended to mature its muscles,

which redden and begin to produce heat

to protect it from the cold.

By accomplishing these processes one after the other,

the young Adelie penguins are finally big and strong enough

to go out to the sea alone at the end of the summer.

(upbeat piano music)

(seal whimpering)

(birds calling)

Due to these astonishing strategies, the fruit of millions

of years of evolution, all of these animals

are perfectly adapted to their environment.

But on the white continent, they are surpassed

by an all-around champion of resistance

to extreme conditions.

Mysterious animals studied by scientists

in a very particular spot in Antarctica.

Located 2,000 kilometers from the Dumont d'Urville Station,

this site was baptized the McMurdo Dry Valleys.

Here, the climate is so dry that it almost never snows.

It is one of the only places on the continent

where the rocky land is bare for most of the year.

The Dry Valley is an amazing place.

It reminds me of a vast desert on Mars.

It's got mountains on the side with glaciers coming down.

It's got frozen, ice-covered lakes, and then there's

this vast area of just nothing but dry soil and rocks.

And it really does look like a desert.

It looks like it could be a hot desert

except for the glaciers.

For over 20 years now, Diana Wall has gone

to the Dry Valleys to study the physiology

of the microscopic fauna found there.

Her objects of research, thousands of samples

of dehydrated soils taken from the field.

(dramatic music)

Once weighed, rehydrated, filtered,

then passed through the centrifuge, the fragments

of Antarctic Earth reveal discreet inhabitants.

(soft music)

These strange little worms are waking up

after months in the freezer.

They are less than half a millimeter long

and are called nematodes.

Three main kinds exist in the Dry Valleys.

Here is Scottnema lindsayae, by far the most numerous.

Amplectis Antarcticus.

(soft music)

And here are the rarest Eudorylaimus Antarcticus.

(soft music)

Nematodes are the principal inhabitants of Antarctic soils.

But looking closer, one cn also see other residents.

These tiny and round organisms are rotifers.

(soft music)

And these, with their eight pudgy limbs,

are called tardigrades.

(soft music)

All of these minuscule creatures are part of the most

resistant species on the planet.

Rotifers, nematodes and tardigrades

can stop somewhere in their life cycle, almost anywhere,

and start to dehydrate.

And nematodes in particular, you think about a worm

moving like this, they will sense

that it's getting drier, and they can coil

is one mechanism where they just slowly

get smaller and smaller and smaller

and reduce their surface area.

And then the other thing they do is they change

their biochemical pathway.

So they're starting to conserve their membranes.

And they're losing 99% of their water in their body,

so it doesn't freeze.

Nematodes, rotifers and tardigrades

can remain in a state of extreme dehydration

for months, even years, or decades.

They do not eat, reproduce or move.

They content themselves with waiting for better days.

Then, a few drops of water are enough to wake them up.

What are the precise mechanisms

of this extraordinary resistance?

What role do they play in the austral ecosystem?

These beings have many secrets to reveal.

But their ultimate adaptation could become

their Achilles' heel in these times of rapid climate change.

We do not know how long it takes a nematode to adapt.

We do not know how long it'll take these species.

Are they such cold species that

they take advantage of any increase or decrease

or a lot longer light or whatever period,

or temperature period?

Or are they going to be, wow, I can only do cold,

I can't take this fluctuation, my population will decline?

For these microscopic species and for all

the others, it is difficult to predict the future.

(penguins squawking)

But certain effects of global warming

are already perceptible in the field.

And in particular among penguins.

(penguins squawking)

Close the flap?

We'll try to shut the enclosure

and then evacuate after.

(penguins squawking)

Wait, leave this side open.

(penguins squawking)

Today, Christophe and his team have to capture

the emperor chicks to tag them with an electronic chip.

This gives them a unique number

so that they can be followed from one year to another.

The organization of his team is well rehearsed.

They have been tagging chicks with chips

for seven years now.

All around the colony, detectors are hidden in the ice.

They read data from the chips each time

a tagged penguin crosses the cable.

This allows us to know the comings

and goings of the emperors between the sea and the colony,

and the detection data that we receive throughout the life

of an emperor allows us to measure demographic parameters

such as survival rates, mortality rates,

and that allows to understand the dynamics

of populations of emperor penguins.

We can then correlate this data to physical parameters,

regarding ocean life, for example.

And it's this which will allow us to measure the impacts

of climate change on emperor penguins.

(soft dramatic music)

To formulate the first predictions

on the emperor penguins of Dumont d'Urville,

we will have to wait for about 10 years,

the time it takes to accumulate enough data

on the evolution of the general population.

(soft dramatic music)

The colony is doing well this beginning of summer.

The count this year is over 2,000 well-fattened

and healthy chicks.

But the two previous years, it was quite a different story.

When it was time to go out to sea,

only 100 chicks had survived, a mortality rate of 90%,

as opposed to the usual 50%.

(soft dramatic music)

What were the origins of this catastrophe?

A particularly vast ice sheet spread out

around Dumont d'Urville.

Therefore the birds had to travel considerable

distances to go fetch food at sea.

And the chicks, malnourished, died of hunger.

(dramatic music)

Climate change, which every year disturbs more and more

the cycle of the seasons and the quantity of ice,

is certainly at cause in this slaughter.

(dramatic music)

Emperor penguins are not the only victims.

In 2014, the Adelies also had a terrible season.

(penguins squawking)

From 40,000 couples we have in a normal year

between 40,000 and 50,000 chicks,

and last year there were none, which means that all

the chicks are dead, and what's more,

for the same reason as the emperor penguins.

We had a lot of sea ice, so the Adelie penguins

were forced to travel several dozen or even hundreds

of kilometers to go find their food,

so their chicks died of starvation.

In addition to that, we're experiencing a particular

phenomenon, which is that we had seven or eight

consecutive days of positive temperatures last year,

and rain, while usually precipitation here

is in the form of snow.

So the rain meant that a lot of chicks got wet very quickly

and died from the cold as well as from hunger.

In the meteorologists' memory,

never had Dumont d'Urville been subjected to seven

consecutive days of positive temperatures

with so many episodes of rain.

Is this cataclysm among the penguins a warning sign

announcing an imminent disaster?

Or are these events merely exceptional?

(penguins squawking)

Fortunately, this year the collective data is reassuring.

The season was good, and the chicks

are growing reasonably well.

(singing in foreign language)

(soft music)

From the end of December, Point Geology gradually

empties of its inhabitants.

Seals, petrels, penguins, one after the other,

they all return to life at sea,

after having accomplished a new cycle of life.

(singing in foreign language)

For how much longer will we be able

to study and watch this performance?

(soft music)

From the most emblematic to the least well known,

at the surface, as well as in the depths of the ocean,

all living species on the White Continent

are on the front line, directly threatened

by ongoing changes.

Specialists are united in hoping that these superheroes

of the cold are able to adapt rapidly enough

to this previously unseen upheaval.

(singing in foreign language)

(soft music)