Plastic litter is now virtually inescapable throughout every crevice of the world's oceans, and a newly published study finds, for the first time, that the creatures living in the deepest, most remote environs on Earth are eating it in startling amounts.

A British research team captured amphipods, tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that scavenge on the seabed, from six of the world's deepest ocean trenches and took them back to their lab. There, they discovered that more than 80 percent of the amphipods had plastic fibers and particles in their digestive systems, known as the hindgut. The deeper the trench, the more fibers they found. In the Mariana Trench, the deepest at more than seven miles beneath the waves in the western