Study reveals fishing’s startling global footprint: ‘It totally blows me away’
HALIFAX — Global fishing efforts are so wide ranging that fleets covered more than 460 million kilometres in 2016 — a distance equal to going to the moon and back 600 times.
That startling revelation is contained in a newly published study in Science that quantifies fishing’s global footprint for the first time.
“I’ve been working on fishing for 20 years and it totally blows me away,” co-author Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said of the findings.
The study — which included researchers from Global Fishing Watch, National Geographic, Google and U.S. universities such as Stanford — used satellite feeds and common ship tracking technology known as the automatic identification system (AIS).