Own Correspondent, Wellington | Saturday
SCIENTISTS have discovered penguin chicks fouled with what appeared to be oil close to an abandoned US Antarctic research station.
The oiled Adelie penguin chicks were found at Cape Hallett on a recent mission close to the abandoned US research station, Emma Waterhouse, a scientist with the research group Antarctic New Zealand said on Saturday.
Waterhouse said she believed it was “the first oil-contaminated penguin breeding site discovered in Antarctica.”
Antarctic New Zealand said in a statement that a scientific cleanup party had uncovered about a dozen previously unknown melt pools of ice fouled with “what appeared to be petroleum residue.”
Oil and melt-water and soil samples have been collected and sent for analysis in the United States, as the scientists tried to confirm the source of the pollution, Waterhouse said.
Some of the contaminated pools were up to 20m metres long and 4-5 metres wide, with the fouled chicks living close to them among the colony of 50 000 breeding pairs.
The four-member clean up team, consisting of three Americans and a New Zealander, saw only “a small number” of the chicks with oil contamination.
Fencing materials will be taken to Cape Hallett “at the earliest opportunity to fence off the pools during the penguin breeding season when the chicks are most likely to become fouled,” Waterhouse said.
The team found the polluted melt pools during a recent three-week assessment trip to Cape Hallett, some 600km from New Zealand’s McMurdo Station, on the edge of Antarctica.
The team was assessing what measures are still needed to complete a cleanup of the abandoned science station, built by the United States in 1957 and abandoned in 1973.
New Zealand began clearing rubbish from the site in the 1980s, with a US team pumping out a 76 000 litre fuel tank and several smaller tanks in the mid-1990s, and removing the fuel from the site.
Cape Hallett’s huge penguin breeding ground is a popular tourist ship stopover – AFP