Hadn’t thought of this before, just something else we can add to the list.
>>Fishing trawlers that drag big nets along the ocean floor potentially release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the world’s commercial aviation industry.
he first study to estimate the real carbon footprint of bottom trawling globally has found this type of fishing releases roughly 1.47 billion tonnes of aqueous CO2 from the marine soil annually.
That number only represents 0.02 percent of all sedimentary carbon in the ocean – the largest pool of organic carbon on the planet – but as the authors point out, that’s up to 20 percent of the atmospheric CO2 absorbed by the ocean each year and is “comparable to estimates of carbon loss in terrestrial soils caused by farming.”
How much of that aqueous carbon makes its way up into our atmosphere is still unclear, but even if all those emissions remain in the marine environment, they can have detrimental effects on ocean acidification and biodiversity.
“The ocean floor is the world’s largest carbon storehouse. If we’re to succeed in stopping global warming, we must leave the carbon-rich seabed undisturbed,” argues aquatic ecologist Trisha Atwood of Utah State University.
“Yet every day, we are trawling the seafloor, depleting its biodiversity and mobilizing millennia-old carbon and thus exacerbating climate change. Our findings about the climate impacts of bottom trawling will make the activities on the ocean’s seabed hard to ignore in climate plans going forward.”
Satellite data from 2016 to 2019 shows industrial trawlers are dredging up roughly 1.3 percent of the seafloor each year, equivalent to roughly 5 million square kilometers of untouched seafloor (nearly 2 million square miles).
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/techandscience/bottom-trawling-in-the-ocean-is-running-the-tap-on-earth-s-largest-carbon-sink/ar-BB1eMcYi?ocid=msedgntp