Bottom trawling is a non-selective commercial fishing technique whereby heavy nets and gear are pulled along the sea floor. The direct impact of this technique on fish populations and benthic communities has received much attention, but trawling can also modify the physical properties of seafloor sediments, water–sediment chemical exchanges and sediment fluxes. Most of the studies addressing the physical disturbances of trawl gear on the seabed have been undertaken in coastal and shelf environments, however, where the capacity of trawling to modify the seafloor morphology coexists with high-energy natural processes driving sediment erosion, transport and deposition. Here we show that on upper continental slopes, the reworking of the deep sea floor by trawling gradually modifies the shape of the submarine landscape over large spatial scales. We found that trawling-induced sediment displacement and removal from fishing grounds causes the morphology of the deep sea floor to become smoother over time, reducing its original complexity as shown by high-resolution seafloor relief maps. Our results suggest that in recent decades, following the industrialization of fishing fleets, bottom trawling has become an important driver of deep seascape evolution. Given the global dimension of this type of fishery, we anticipate that the morphology of the upper continental slope in many parts of the world’s oceans could be altered by intensive bottom trawling, producing comparable effects on the deep sea floor to those generated by agricultural ploughing on land.
The stability of the Antarctic ice shelves in a warming climate has long been discussed, and the recent collapse of a significant part, over 12,500 km2 in area, of the Larsen ice shelf off the Antarctic Peninsula has led to a refocus toward the implications of ice shelf decay for the stability of Antarctica's grounded ice. Some smaller Antarctic ice shelves have undergone periodic growth and decay over the past 11,000 yr (refs 7-11), but these ice shelves are at the climatic limit of ice shelf viability and are therefore expected to respond rapidly to natural climate variability at century to millennial scales. Here we use records of diatoms, detrital material and geochemical parameters from six marine sediment cores in the vicinity of the Larsen ice shelf to demonstrate that the recent collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf is unprecedented during the Holocene. We infer from our oxygen isotope measurements in planktonic foraminifera that the Larsen B ice shelf has been thinning throughout the Holocene, and we suggest that the recent prolonged period of warming in the Antarctic Peninsula region, in combination with the long-term thinning, has led to collapse of the ice shelf.
Bathymetry (seafloor depth), is a critical parameter providing the geospatial context for a multitude of marine scientific studies. Since 1997, the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) has been the authoritative source of bathymetry for the Arctic Ocean. IBCAO has merged its efforts with the Nippon Foundation-GEBCO-Seabed 2030 Project, with the goal of mapping all of the oceans by 2030. Here we present the latest version (IBCAO Ver. 4.0), with more than twice the resolution (200 × 200 m versus 500 × 500 m) and with individual depth soundings constraining three times more area of the Arctic Ocean (∼19.8% versus 6.7%), than the previous IBCAO Ver. 3.0 released in 2012. Modern multibeam bathymetry comprises ∼14.3% in Ver. 4.0 compared to ∼5.4% in Ver. 3.0. Thus, the new IBCAO Ver. 4.0 has substantially more seafloor morphological information that offers new insights into a range of submarine features and processes; for example, the improved portrayal of Greenland fjords better serves predictive modelling of the fate of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Background & Summary A broad range of Arctic climate and environmental research, including questions on the declining cryosphere and the geological history of the Arctic Basin, require knowledge of the depth and shape of the seafloor 1-3. Bathymetry provides the geospatial framework for these and other studies 4 and has impact on many processes, including the pathways of ocean currents and, thus, the distribution of heat 5,6 , sea-ice decline 7 , the effect of inflowing warm waters on tidewater glaciers 8 , and the stability of marine-based ice streams and outlet glaciers grounded on the seabed 9-11. Bathymetric data from large parts of the Arctic Ocean are, however, not available or extremely sparse due to difficulties, both logistical and political, in accessing the region 12. The International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean (IBCAO) project, was initiated in 1997 in St Petersburg, Russia, to address the need for up-to-date digital portrayals of the Arctic Ocean seafloor 13. Since 1997, three Digital Bathymetric Models (DBMs) have ingested new data sets compiled by the IBCAO project team and have been released for public use 14-16. These DBMs comprised grids with a regular cell size of 2.5 × 2.5 km (Ver. 1.0), 2 × 2 km (Ver. 2.0) and 500 × 500 m (Ver. 3.0) on a Polar Stereographic projection. Depth estimates for grid cells between constraining depth observations were interpolated by the continuous curvature spline in a tension gridding algorithm 17. All depth data available at the time of the compilations were used, including multi-and single-beam bathymetry, and contours and soundings digitized from depth charts, with direct depth observations having the highest priority and digitized contours the lowest 18. Recognizing the importance of complete global bathymetry, the General Bathymetric Chart of the Ocean (GEBCO), a project under the auspices of the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commissio...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2025 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.