Scientists Find Size of Whales Is Due to Climate Change

There is cause to believe that climate change is the reason why whales have grown to be so massive in size.
According to a recent study, whales grew to be an average of 30 meters long roughly 4.5 million years ago, a blip in the overarching timeline of our planet. In order to fully grasp the significance of this number, though, we must examine what was occurring on Earth during this time period— that is, the beginning of the first ice ages, otherwise known as Pleistocene Epoch.
During Pleistocene Epoch, it is believed that liquid runoff from glacial expansion deposited nutrients into the oceans, much of which was consumed by krill and other smaller animals that whales fed off of. Due to the fact that climate change had caused many larger sea animals to disappear in the wake of the plummeting temperatures, this created a much patchier pattern of food availability. That being the case, whales would consume these explosively growing smaller animals during abundant seasons of the year, fueling their own growth and ensuring that they could survive in the changing world whilst other large animals went extinct.