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Iceberg Threatens 'March Of Penguins' Colony

An enormous iceberg in Antarctica plowed into a peninsula made of ice and snapped it off, creating a second gigantic iceberg, and threatening the penguin colony made famous by the movie March of the Penguins.

The Mertz glacier in Antarctica has been gradually oozing out to sea, and for the past 70 years, it has been producing a giant tongue of ice.

French and Australian scientists have been watching that tongue because it looked like it would eventually crack off and become a giant iceberg. That's exactly what happened about a week ago, when a 60-mile-long iceberg rammed into it.

The two icebergs are now gradually heading counterclockwise around Antarctica, south of Australia. They're moving toward an area of open water that's the feeding grounds for the Emperor penguins who became international stars in the March of the Penguins documentary.

Biologists say this could make life even tougher for these amazingly hardy birds.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Richard Harris
Award-winning journalist Richard Harris has reported on a wide range of topics in science, medicine and the environment since he joined NPR in 1986. In early 2014, his focus shifted from an emphasis on climate change and the environment to biomedical research.