A recent study concludes that the physical damage wrought by bottom trawling has been significantly greater than that from other human activities combined – oil and gas exploration, waste disposal, and the laying of submarine communication cables.
The study published in the PLoS One journal, an online science publication, investigated the impact of bottom trawling in deep waters, below 200 metres.
Conclusions on the impact of bottom trawling were drawn from VMS datasets from 2005, which spatially analysed the areas trawled in the North-East Atlantic. It was shown that up to 37,160 square kilometres of the seabed area was trawled, however this is predicated upon a wide gear width and high speed range. Moreover, much of the data was merely estimated, as only 2 of 9 States (UK and France) provided the requested data.