But they realised that during the course of expeditions dating back a decade they had accumulated dozens of specimens of a species of tiny shrimp that lives between 6000-11,000 metres (19,500-36,000 feet) beneath the surface.Cases of plastic ingestion have been reported among the deepest ocean animals. More than 300 million tonnes of plastics are produced annually, and there are at wholesale plastic blow moulding machine least five trillion plastic pieces floating in our oceans." Because plastic contamination is now so widespread, even at extreme depths, the team cautioned that it was nearly impossible to know what effect plastic ingestion was having on bottom dwelling species. (Photo: AFP) Philippines: Animals living in the deepest ocean trenches have been found with plastic fragments in their gut."These particles could just pass straight through the animal, but in the animals we looked at they must be blocking them.Because deep-sea exploration is expensive and time-consuming, most studies on plastic pollution up until now had been close to the surface, showing a widespread level of plastic contamination in fish, turtles, whales and sea birds. "It's off Japan, off New Zealand, off Peru, and each trench is phenomenally deep," Jamieson said. The equivalent would be for you to swallow a 2 metre polypropylene rope and expect that not to have an adverse affect on your health," said Jamieson. It's everywhere. Jamieson and his team normally spend their time looking for new species in the depths of the ocean. Now a British team of researchers say they have discovered cases of plastic ingestion among tiny shrimp in six of the world's deepest ocean trenches.In the Mariana Trench east of the Philippines, the deepest depression on Earth, 100 percent of the animals studied had plastic fibres in their digestive tracts.  "We are sitting on the deepest dataset in the world, so if we find (plastics) in these, we are done," Jamieson told AFP. A new research showed how manmade pollution reaches into the bowels of the planet.The team was astonished by just how widespread the plastic contamination at extreme depths proved to be. Microplastic particles are either dumped directly into the seas via sewers and rivers or form when larger chunks of plastic break down over time.He further added, "The salient point is that they are consistently found in animals all around the Pacific at extraordinary depths so let's not waste time. Yet plastic was found in both. "Half of me was expecting to find something but that is huge," said Alan Jamieson, from Newcastle University's School of Natural and Environmental Sciences. For instance, the Peru-Chile Trench in the southeast Pacific is around 15,000 kilometres (9,300 miles) from the Japan Trench.