It's news to no one that plastic poses a serious threat to marine life — only this month, a curvier's beaked whale washed up dead in the Philippines with 40 kilograms of plastic waste in its stomach. With microplastics also being ingested by plankton, fish, and birds — which often end up dying as a result of the build-up in their systems — it's clear to see that our problem with plastic has got out of hand. Unfortunately, the problem is far more extensive than previously thought, according to a team of researchers from the University of Newcastle. Microplastics are being consumed by animals in the farthest depths of the ocean. As part of the Sky Ocean Rescue project, a team led by Dr. Alan Jamieson collected crustaceans from six different deep-sea trenches. The researchers looked at various places all over the world, including the Mariana Trench, the Japan Trench, the Atacama Trench, the New Hebrides Trench, and the Kermadec Trench. Looking at their results — which they recorded in Royal Society Open Science — the scientists were unpleasantly shocked. 72% of all crustaceans they studied were found with plastic in their stomachs. Even worse, the deeper the scientists looked, the more plastic they found. At a depth of 11,000 meters in the Mariana Trench, the researchers found plastic particles in 100% of all crustaceans. Read more: The UN has warned that we only have 12 years to curb climate change "This study has shown that manmade microfibers are culminating and accumulating in an ecosystem inhabited by species we poorly understand, cannot observe experimentally and have failed to obtain baseline data for prior to contamination," marine scientist Alan Jamieson said in a Newcastle University press release. It's unlikely that there are still marine ecosystems in existence unaffected by our waste — last year, plastic bags were found in even the Mariana Trench, the deepest point out of all the oceans. "It is intuitive that the ultimate sink for this debris, in whatever size, is the deep sea," Jamieson said in a second press release from Newcastle University. "If you contaminate a river, it can be flushed clean. If you contaminate a coastline, it can be diluted by the tides. But, in the deepest point of the oceans, it just sits there." "Once these plastics reach the deep-seafloor there is simply nowhere else for them to go, therefore it is assumed they will simply accumulate in greater quantities — this is a very worrying find." The fact that plastic was found in the stomachs of creatures in so many different areas — some thousands of kilometers apart — demonstrates that the problem is global. Read also: Turtles have a one in five chance of dying if they eat just one piece of plastic According to a study by the University of Georgia, humanity produced over 8.3 billion tons of plastic between the 1950s and 2015. Over 6.3 billion tons of it have been thrown away so it just sits on landfills or ends up in ecosystems. "The more you think about it, the more depressing it is," Jamieson said.
Animals in the deepest parts of the ocean are consuming microplastics, researchers from the Sky Ocean Rescue project at the University of Newcastle have found. The research took place across the world at locations including the Mariana Trench, the Japan Trench, the Atacama Trench, the New Hebrides Trench and the Kermadec Trench. The research found that almost three-quarters of all crustaceans had plastic in their stomachs, while plastic was found in 72% of crustaceans at a depth of 11,000 metres in the Mariana Trench.