One and a half million penguins are hard to miss - or so you would think.

Scientists have just announced the discovery of a "supercolony" of Adélie penguins off the Antarctic Peninsula, which have lived undisturbed for nearly 60 years.

It comes after thousands of Adélie penguin chicks died between 2010 and 2017 due to mass starvation, in what French scientists described as a "catastrophic breeding failure" caused by unusually thick sea ice which forced their parents to forage further for food.

As a result, only two chicks out of 18,000 pairs of Adélie penguins in East Antarctica survived the early 2017 breeding season.

However, this supercolony were found on the rocky and remote Danger Islands after NASA satellites picked up patches of their excrement, known as guano, in 2014.

The images prompted a group of scientists, including Oxford University's Dr Tom Hart, to arrange an expedition the following year to find out how many penguins were there.

Dr Hart told The Telegraph “This is the biggest colony discovered recently. It is a huge number of penguins.