Mud trails in the Gulf of Mexico Apparently today I’m writing about fishing vessels view
Mud trails in the Gulf of Mexico Apparently today I’m writing about fishing vessels viewed from space. This pair of images (the lower is a zoomed-in version of the upper) was taken a few years ago by the Landsat 7 satellite and shows the results of a particularly vicious type of fishing; bottom trawling. All of the white lines you see are sediment plumes from the ocean floor churned up by fishing boats dragging their nets across the ocean bottom to scoop up shrimp, squid, and so on. This type of fishing is extremely harmful to the ocean environment. The mud at the base of the ocean is home to a wide variety of species, including species that the organisms being fished-for depend on for survival. In this type of fishing, meters of that sediment is lifted from the ocean floor and tossed into the currents, leaving the ocean floor barren and unable to support life until the sediment recovers. On top of that, the plumes of mud and silt lifted up from the ocean floor can settle downwards onto other areas of the ocean floor nearby, burying and killing any life at those locations. Although this is an extremely efficient way to catch the first batch of shrimp, because of the environmental degradation, many countries are taking steps to ban this practice. Norway, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia can be highlighted in that regard; the United States has banned this type of fishing off its Pacific coastline but it continues to be permitted in the Gulf of Mexico. -JBB Image credit and source:http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/earthmatters/2013/10/24/best-of-the-archives-mudtrails-from-fishing-trawlers/ -- source link
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