Get the latest tech news
Trawling Boats Are Hauling Up Ancient Carbon From the Ocean Depths
The world’s trawlers are stirring carbon dioxide into the water—and into the atmosphere.
In a paper publishing in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, researchers have tallied up an estimate of how much seafloor carbon the bottom-trawling industry stirs into the water and how much of that is released into the air as CO 2 each year, exacerbating global warming. “At least 55 to 60 percent of the CO 2 created by trawling—scraping the seafloor—is going to come into the atmosphere within nine years,” says lead author and ecosystem ecologist Trisha Atwood, who focuses on carbon cycling at Utah State University and National Geographic ’s Pristine Seas program. For example, hard corals in Alaska, which have been dated to hundreds of thousands of years old, can be destroyed in just a single swipe.” Anything caught up in the net that wasn’t the target food species—known as bycatch—gets hauled aboard the ship, often dead, and thrown back overboard.
Or read this on Wired