The highest was over 4000. Bits of plastic. Per square fucking metre. We are fucked dude.
Honestly the biggest sign that life on earth is almost over. There's nothing we can economically do to remove the plastic, and we are not only not fixing the issue, we're accelerating it.
This is what doomer-fies me more than anything. Like before the pandemic, west coast cities were triumphalist that they banned plastic fkn straws. Now we have 9 billion disposable masks making their way to the landfills / oceans. Nobody cares. At the grocery store, every individual donut is put in its own hard plastic container.
I see people like "We're going to emerge from this pandemic and it will be a love fest!" No, we're going to emerge into a brutal police / surveillance state on the eve of climate annihilation.
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
hadn't seen that, gonna check it out
https://yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com/post/11950502897/taco-bell
Still blows my mind that they found bits of microplastics on the Arctic too. They are literally enveloping the planet.
There are microplastics in the deepest parts of the Earth and at its highest points. You could take a glass of seawater from anywhere on Earth and it'd be full of the same microplastics. It's everywhere inside our bodies, too. It causes brain damage in fish.
They're also the genesis of the Alex Jones myth about "turning the frickin frogs gay!"
BPA, in particular, can pass through frogs skin so they absorb it just by swimming in contaminated water.
Somehow this fucks me up less than learning that humans consume about a credit card worth of micro plastics per week (5g)
