"A year after a shipwreck flooded India’s beaches with tiny plastic pieces, scientists fear the environmental damage has just begun."
"The sand is littered with what look like tiny gleaming pearls. It’s June 2025, and A.P. Aswin, an environmental scientist at the University of Kerala in southern India, is hunched over a square roughly the size of a sofa cushion that he’s marked out on the beach. The water has receded from the high tide zone, leaving the sand smooth and wet. Near the center of the plot, Aswin and his colleagues drive a long plastic pipe into the beach until it’s almost completely submerged. After carefully pulling the now sand-filled pipe back out, the scientists pack the sample away. This is one of 75 similar cores they’ll collect from 25 beaches along India’s southern coast over the next three weeks—a bid to scientifically study the environmental catastrophe washing ashore between Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
A month earlier, on May 24, 2025, the MSC Elsa 3, a Liberian-flagged container ship, was sailing up the Indian coast from Vizhinjam to Kochi when it began to tilt dangerously to its right side. The next morning, the ship sank 24 kilometers (15 miles) from the Kerala coast. Of the 640 containers set adrift when the ship sank, thirteen held hazardous chemicals. The ship was loaded with 84 million metric tons of diesel and 367 million metric tons of furnace oil. But the ship was also carrying another pollutant—stored on its deck were more than 70,000 bags of a particularly pernicious cargo of tiny plastic pellets known as “nurdles.”
About the size of a lentil, a nurdle is one of the raw materials used in plastic manufacturing. Frequently shipped around the world, nurdles are melted down and molded into many everyday plastic products, from packaging and PVC pipes to water bottles, toys, and other household goods. But when spilled into the ocean, they can wreak long-lasting havoc on the environment and the organisms that live there."
Kamala Thiagarajan reports for bioGraphic June 11, 2026.
