• The French base
• Adelie penguins

The Dumont d’Urville Station is a French scientific station located in Antartica. It is named after explorer, Jules Dumont d’Urville. A pioneering French Antarctic research station, Port Martin, located 62 km east of D’Urville, was destroyed by fire on the night of January 23, 1952, without death or injury.

The new main base, Dumont D’Urville station, was built on the same island and opened in 1956, to serve as a center for French scientific research - the station has remained in active use ever since.

The station allows only 30-40 people to come ashore at one time. Ice and strong katabatic winds often prevent landings, either by Zodiac or by helicopter. The station can accommodate about 30 winter-overs and 120 during the summer. The icebreaker ship l’Astrolabe (French) carries supplies and personnel to the station from the port of Hobart, Tasmania. It does 5 round-trips between November and March.

The Academy Award-winning documentary film La Marche de l’empereur, released in English as March of the Penguins, was filmed in the region around this base.

Adelie Penguins

Adelie penguins are the smallest of the penguins living on the Antarctica continent. They are about 28 inches (70 cm) tall and weigh about 8 to 9 lbs. (4 kilogram). The Adelie penguin is named after the wife of the French explorer Admiral Durmont d’ Urville, the Adelie is also the most commonly studied of all the penguin species.

Adelie penguins can be found forming colonies on islands, beaches and headlands all around the Antarctic coast.

Competition for nesting sites can be fierce and the older more dominant birds tend to stake nests in the middle of the colony where they are better protected from marauding skuas.

A mating pair of Adelies will build a rocky nest of small stones carried in the birds’ beaks and dropped into place.

After bonding and mating, the female lays 2 eggs in the nest. The male then takes over the job of keeping the egg warm by holding it on the tops of his feet or laying on the egg in the nest. The female goes to feed and returns in three weeks to help with the chicks. When parents return with food for the chicks it will run from the chicks making the chicks chase and catch them for the food. Their chicks grow the fastest of all penguins.

Hatching occurs after about 35 days. The chicks are brooded closely by their parents for the first two to three weeks. Growing rapidly, the chicks soon develop a thick woolly gray down and quickly become almost as large as their parents.

By late March most of the chicks can swim and the Adelies then depart for the pack ice and the sea.

Adelie penguins have to defend their nests from other penguins who try to steal pebbles, stones, and other nest building materials.

They don’t drink water but eat snow. They have a gland in their nose that takes the salt out of the ocean water that they swallow when catching fish and eating fish while in the water.

The Adelie’s main oceanic predators are leopard seals which often lie in wait beneath the ledges to snare the first penguin into the water.

Scientists today use the Adelie as an indicator species to monitor the abundance of krill, so important to the web of Antarctic life. Scientists have been studying Adélie penguins (Pygoscelie adeliae) for over 50 years. Antarctica is one of the last places in the world where animals can be studied in a habitat still largely unmodified by man. It is thought that data on changes to penguin populations may reflect the impacts that humans and natural factors, like climate change, may be having on the marine ecosystem