Deep sea mining 'gold rush' moves closer
18 May 2013
The prospect of a deep sea "gold rush" opening a controversial new frontier for mining on the ocean floor has moved a step closer.
French government special envoy for the planet calls on French Fisheries Minister to support
phase-out of deep-sea bottom trawling and bottom gillnet fishing
17 April 2013
At the conference on high seas governance organized by the French Consultative Assembly (The
“CESE”,Economic, Social and Environmental Council) on April 11 in Paris, Mr.Nicolas Hulot,recently named “Special Envoy for the Protection of the Planet” by French President François Hollande, called on France to “take action” and urged French FisheriesMinister, Mr. Frédéric Cuvillier, to put an end to deep-sea fishing,which he called “an ecological and economic nonsense”, typical of a “wasteful civilization”.
EU's Damanaki calls for high seas biodiversity protection treaty
15 April 2013
An updated U.N. treaty governing the exploitation of deep-sea bioresources is urgently needed, EU Maritime Affairs Commissioner Maria Damanaki says.
Scientists call for larger ocean reserves
15 April 2013
Leading international marine scientists have called for the protection of more, large marine wilderness areas in a bid to shield the world’s dwindling stocks of fish from destruction.
Did you know?
Some cold-water corals are between 5,000 and 8,000 years old, the same age or even older than the great Pyramids of Egypt.
Deep-sea cold-water corals support 1,500 species of fish.
Deep-sea fish like the orange roughy live for 150 years.
Elephants will live for around 70 years in the wild.
Deep-sea fish like the orange roughy live for 150 years.
The oldest bird recorded was 77, the oldest cat was 38.
There are more than 100,000 seamounts across the globe. They are like highway service stations for the ocean.
Seamounts are deliberately targeted by bottom impact trawlers, which smash and scrape the sides of the mountain bare in their quest for fish.
Less than 0.001 percent of the world’s seamounts have been studied in detail, that’s the equivalent of just one out of 100,000.
The no-take protected area of the whole Mediterranean Sea amounts to around 202km², an area just twice the size of Paris.
Every year some 15 million square km of ocean is bottom trawled — an area bigger than Canada, and one and a half times the size of Europe.
A trawl scar can be 4km long — it would take you an hour to walk along its length, longer to swim it.
The average trawl releases enough silt to fill 3,500 Olympic-size swimming pools or the entire Empire State Building.
