This is the Guardian.

Today, the huge problem facing the tiny miraculous worlds that make life on Earth possible.

Out in the Danish countryside, it's a hot day and on a quiet stretch of road, a scientist gets ready for an experiment.

So what he does is he gets in his car which is a kind of beat up old 1960s Ford Anglia.

He gets to about 60 kilometres an hour.

And now that point is in research conditions.

With bemused farmers watching from their fields, the man drives down the same stretch of road at the same speed, again and again and again.

He's been doing that every summer since 1997.

What all of a millman, Guardian US's environment correspondent is describing, isn't a man conducting a 25-year experiment on his car's reliability

or efficiency. Instead, the scientist, under his muller, has his eyes fixed forward, watching and listening for what might hit the glass just in his room's face.

Sometimes they're quite heavy hits, a big bumblebee will hit the windscreen sometimes, is quite a faint hits of mosquitoes or other insects.

And the reason he's been doing that is to see how many smash against the windscreen of his car.

Moller pulls over and climbs out to inspect the smashed guts of bugs on glass, methodically logging the numbers of insects he sees.

Something he repeats every year until he's got 25 years of data and what it reveals shocks him.

There's been a 97% decrease in insects that have hit his screen beyond anything that anybody really expected.

I mean, that's incredible. It's like a wipeout from however many insects to 97% fewer over not that much time. Like we're talking a couple of decades.

Yeah, and this isn't outlier in any kind of way. And it's really kind of indication of the unfolding insect crisis that is engulfing much of the world now.

With so much going on in the world right now, all the destruction we can see, it's easy to overlook the destruction we can't.

There was a UN report that came out in 2019 that warned that half a million insects species faced extinction by the middle point of this century, which is an enormous loss.

But the massive decline in insect populations isn't just bad for bees, ants, beetles and the other tiny creatures that are vanishing quickly. It's a huge problem for humans too.

From the Guardian, a Michael Saafi, today in focus, the insects that keep nature humming and what their demise means for the rest of us.

Oliver Millman, alongside reporting on the environment for the Guardian, you've also recently written a book on the rapid decline of insect populations.

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