Earth's oceans offer up stunning sunsets, bizarre underwater sea creatures, monster catchesand apparently, trillions of pieces of plastic trash.

According to a new study, an estimated 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic trash with a total weight of 269,000 tons now litters Earth's oceans. That figure is 10 times greater than previously thought, Live Science reports, and the scientists involved in the study say the figure is "highly conservative."

The team of scientists traversed Earth's oceans on 24 separate missions over a six-year period, observing and/or collecting ocean trash at 1,571 different locales, including at all of the world's five gyres, to formulate data, the Washington Post reports. Model simulations on the data then resulted in the 5.25 trillion estimate.

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Unfortunately, that figure is likely smaller than the actual amount present in our oceans, because of the difficulty of tracking smaller pieces of plastic, Marcus Eriksen, the lead researcher of the study, told the Washington Post. Most of the 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic are small, between just 1 millimeter and 4.75 millimeters in size.

That's because larger pieces of plastic are carried via ocean currents to Earth's gyres -- where ocean currents meet -- and coalesce there, degrading in the elements and breaking apart into smaller and smaller pieces as they bump and grind against each other in the gyres, the New York Times reports.

Those small pieces of plastic are then carried away by ocean currents and lost beneath the surface, meaning there's a "potentially massive amount of plastic present on shorelines, on the seabed, suspended in the water column, and within organisms" that wasn't tracked in the study, Eriksen told the Washington Post.

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The horrible environmental impact of the plastic, large and small pieces alike, is well documented. Wildlife like sea turtles and seabirds often get snared in the bigger pieces of plastic and die, unable to move freely and feed or fend for themselves.

And adverse health impacts from plastic can be transferred to humans, too, when we consume fish that have eaten the tiny pieces of plastic. Pollutants, like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), accumulate in large amounts in plastic debris in the ocean, NOAA reports.

“Plastics are like a cocktail of contaminants floating around in the aquatic habitat,” Chelsea M. Rochman, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Davis, told the New York Times. “These contaminants may be magnifying up the food chain.”

Meaning humans' ocean plastic problem could reach well beyond the oceans and into our homes.

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A man scavenges through a polluted river in Jakarta. (BAY ISMOYO/AFP/Getty Images)