Researchers have discovered that 90 percent of seabirds are eating from the massive flow of plastic trash that is flowing through the ocean.

The study, published this week, was able to track how widespread plastics inside of seabirds around the world are becoming, according to National Geographic.

“That was shocking,” says Chris Wilcox, a research scientist with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and lead author of the study. “Essentially, the number of species and number of individuals within species that you find plastic in is going up fairly rapidly by a couple percent every year.”

After decades of scientists tracking plastic ingestion by seabirds, the amount of birds with plastics inside of them has increased from less than five percent in 1960 to 80 percent. The plastics that have been found in birds includes bottle caps, synthetic fibers from clothing, tiny rice-sized plastics and bags.

Wilcox said that the most horrifying information they have come across is the link between the increasing rate of plastics manufactured and the quickly increasing rate at which the material is affecting seabirds.

“Global plastic production doubles every 11 years,” Wilcox says. “So in the next 11 years, we’ll make as much plastic as we’ve made since plastic was invented. Seabirds’ ingestion of plastic is tracking with that.”

The research team analyzed data back to 1962 when putting their report together. They then combined data with maps that revealed the 186 species of seabirds as well as the global distribution of marine debris. From this, they were able to build a model that would predict which species take in the most amount of plastic.

They found that the highest concentration of plastic in birds was in a population in southern Australia, South Africa and South America. The coastlines of these locations are closest to loosely-concentrated collections of ocean debris in the southern Pacific, southern Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

“It’s at the edge of the gyre and the edge of the seabird distribution that are at the highest risk,” Wilcox says.