Nearly a quarter of the world’s wild-caught seafood is scooped up by bottom trawlers, fishing vessels that drag heavy nets over the seafloor. These boats fish the world over and support numerous global seafood supply chains. Yet critics have dogged them as environmentally unfriendly. Conservation experts say they can damage sensitive marine ecosystems, like deep-sea coral, and scoop up mobs of non-target species as bycatch. Research also suggests trawlers can disturb carbon deposits in seabed sediment, undermining the ocean’s ability to act as a carbon sink. But how much carbon does trawling actually release? And what happens to that carbon? These questions have generated significant debate. A new study published Jan. 18 in Frontiers in Marine Science attempts to answer at least one unresolved question: How much carbon does trawling put into the atmosphere? The research draws on a 2021 study published in Nature that calculated that trawling stirs up and releases about 1 gigaton, or 1 billion metric tons, of carbon each year — nearly equivalent to the annual emissions from the global aviation industry. The new study takes things one step further. It recalculates the amount of released carbon by adjusting the models from the Nature paper. Then it quantifies how much of this carbon escapes from the sea into the atmosphere, adding to the mass amounts of human-produced carbon dioxide already there that are causing global warming. A shrimp trawler pursued by sea lions and sea gulls in Mexico. Image ©️ Greenpeace / Alex Hofford. It found…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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