This island was home to the planet’s largest penguin colony. Here’s why it just lost that title - CTV News

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Penguin Colony is probably the best pisstake of Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror I've played. It's the best because it places Lovecraft's universe at a creaturely remove, amplifying its absurdity without having to drop any punchlines. Entering a ravaged polar campsite, I advance among burning tents and uniformed corpses to a pioneer seated on a crate, who is busily sawing his own face off. Ice and snow shrill overhead and Lenval Brown's narration rumbles in my bones, speaking of eldritch relics and unquenchable ambitions, of "queer creatures" and inexplicable deaths, of madness and glory, of "scientific explanations" and empires from other dimensions. I consider all this, and say: Fnaaarp. Another man standing at the top of a pile of sandbags catches my attention. I waddle up to him and his head explodes, emitting a gory spark that resolves into the word "sex". I regard the body gravely and say: urk urk urk. Then I flop on my belly and slither out of camp, chasing the whistling wires of the wind. For I am a penguin. These creatures, their flags, their words and their elder gods mean little to me.

Published: October 07, 2026 at 8:39p.m. EDTAn uninhabited volcanic island in the Southern Ocean used to be home to the largest penguin colony in the world — but not anymore. Scientists have discovered the staggering loss of more than half a million chinstrap penguins from the isolated outcrop. Chinstrap penguins, named for the narrow band of black feathers under their chins, thrive in harsh locations and Zavodovski Island fits the bill perfectly. Part of the South Sandwich Islands archipelago north of Antarctica, the island is wild, craggy and windswept. Zavodovski is home to both chinstraps and macaroni penguins, which have distinctive yellow feather plumes on their heads. In 2011, it was named the largest penguin colony in the world, but when British Antarctic Survey researchers travelled to the island in 2023, they found the chinstraps had suffered huge declines. CNN Penguin colony A penguin colony on Zavodovski Island. (Credit: John Dickens via CNN Newsource) More than half a million have been lost since 2011, representing a quarter of the island’s penguins, according to the the findings published Wednesday in the journal Current Biology.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.