Last month, her team Adrift Lab found a bird that broke the record: almost a fifth of its entire body weight was plastic.
“To witness it first-hand, it is incredibly visceral. There is now so much plastic inside the birds you can feel it on the outside of the animal when it is still alive. As you press on its belly … you hear the pieces grinding against each other."
Since Dr Lavers’s first visit in 2008, she has witnessed an increase from about three quarters of birds carrying about five to 10 pieces of plastic, to every single bird having 50 or more pieces.
The worst part is that in evolutionary terms, everything’s happening at breakneck speed. There hasn’t been a need for life on earth to adapt to changing conditions this quickly since the planet got plastered by a giant space rock. Even then, the dinosaurs to hundreds of thousands of years to finally go extinct. We’ve cut that down to hundreds of years, and that still feels like a time scale that the human brain can’t cope with when it comes to planning and decisionmaking.
Really? That’s super interesting, I didn’t know that. Going to have to look more at that because most of the information I’ve heard has been focused on the impact itself. (I was not really taught this tbf).
So the initial impact vaporized stuff in the immediate vicinity and blanketed much of the planet in ash, but shit may not have gotten real for the eastern hemisphere until the Deccan Traps kicked off, which researchers now think was a secondary result of the impact. Almost the entire Indian subcontinent got covered in basalt.
It’s debated what’s fully responsible but the giant volcanic eruption probably didn’t help.
Earth had a real bad hair day that day
Of all the days the planet has had, the day of the Chicxulub impact is probably one of the more eventful.