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| Ruthless Form of Fishing |
 Overfishing in coastal and offshore waters has prompted the increase of deep sea bottom trawling, a "ruthless" technique, according to the New York Times.
Recently released satellite imagery reveals a clear view of exactly how trawling impacts the ocean floor, including images of stirred sediment known to affect marine ecosystems.
But deep sea trawling reaches far below these findings to underwater mountains, known as "seamounts," and disrupts deep water ecosystems previously known for their ecologically rich habitats. According to the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, the earth contains approximately 31,000 seamounts, some over 3,281 feet high.
Over half of these ecosystems are found beyond national boundaries, allowing bottom trawlers to operate without regulation. While trawling, vessels drag nets with widths of over 300 feet along the sea floor while, according to Greenpeace, "large metal plates and rubber wheels attached to these nets move along the bottom and crush nearly everything in their path."
In 2004, the UN General Assembly urged all national to consider temporary bans on trawling. Four years later, MSNBC reports "tens of thousands of trawlers operating in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of many Latin American countries, off the west coast of Africa, in Chinese waters, and the North Sea."
Many environmental groups say the effects of a ban on the commercial fishing trade are minor compared to the ecological costs of deep sea trawling. Such damages include destruction of coral, sponges, fish and other animals inhabiting these marine ecosystems. Evidence including trawl door marks, boulders on the sediment, bare rocks and few visible species are indications of the deep sea vessels and their harsh activity.
Jeffrey Drazen, a specialist from University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Nature News that "the impacts of fishing in the world's oceans are greater than previously thought." He described regions of the ocean once thought to be pristine as being severely affected by the practice of commercial deep sea fishing.
The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition equates trawling to "clear-cutting a rain forest," a process in which "non-target" species are often captured, discarded, and often killed as a waste product.
"We're a long way from protecting the ocean floor from bottom trawling," Elliot Norse of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute told LiveScience.
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