The Core

Some years ago scientists realized that the melting of polar ice and other effects of climate change were affecting the tilt and wobble of the earth, but the data didn’t quite match up.

Through extensive modeling, they have determined that the missing piece was groundwater pumping, which has changed the weight distribution of the planet and resulted in a 0.24 inch (1cm) rise in sea level and a 31” change in the tilt of the earth’s axis as a result of two teratons (2150 gigatons) of water pumped since 1993.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/06/27/groundwater-use-planet-earth-tilt/

It boggles the mind how rapidly things scale when you have hundreds of millions or billions of people doing the same thing every day.

I think of this all the time when I'm at a place like Costco and see people queuing up with six full chickens. Or for that matter, with a container of raspberries.

But the one that blew my mind is to learn that 22 metric TONS of disposable contact lenses are flushed down the drain each year in the United States. That number does not include the number of lenses that go into the solid waste stream. And it's estimated that only 21% of lenses are flushed and that is just the US. So more than 100 tons of contact lenses are disposed each year in the US, and the worldwide total must be well beyond double that.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/flushing-contact-lenses-down-drain-180970154/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32869978/

That story seemed ridiculous to me at first, but I started doing some back of the napkin calcs with some basic assumptions and the numbers became believable, if still utterly boggling. Try though I might, I am just not mentally equipped to grasp the scale of small actions when played out over millions and billions of people.