Researchers at the University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute believe that the plastic in the ocean is disappearing into an unknown sink.
Millions of tons of plastic items end up in oceans every day, and for over a decade, scientists have assumed that most of the plastic ends of as "plastic islands" that float on oceanic surface.
Researchers have since found a lower concentration of plastic waste in the water samples than other study models predicted, according to a press release issued by the University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute.
The amount of litter going into the water bodies initially kept pace with the production of plastic. In the mid-1980s however, the level of plastic debris in the ocean levelled-off, despite the continuous disposal of these polymers, according to the release.
Plastic breaks down into smaller bits due to sunlight and oceanic currents.
Researchers in the current study used fine mesh to catch ultrafine particles, but the plastic load in the water samples was less than predicted, according to the release.
There is a chance the plastic bits could have entered marine creatures' bodies.
"There is potential," said Carlos Duarte, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia and co-author of the study, according to The Verge, "for this plastic to enter the global ocean food web."
The samples uses for the study came from Spanish Circumnavigation Expedition Malaspina 2010, a nine-month expedition to study the effect of climate change on the world's oceans.
For the study, researchers analyzed samples obtained from 3,070 ocean surface samples collected from 141 sites all over the world, according to the release.
They discovered that 88 percent of the water samples had a wide range of plastic particles.
The water samples had low concentration of plastic fragments that were smaller than one millimeter in diameter, according to the team.
The concentration of plastic particles was also less than expected, according to the release.
The study was published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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