The way the deep ocean is being handled is subtly unnerving. When most people think of the sea, they envision beaches, waves, and possibly coral reefs in a vibrant tropical postcard. The cold, dark, nearly unfathomable area below, where mountains rise from the seafloor and corals older than the pyramids cling to rock, is the part that matters most, and they hardly ever imagine it. Few people are watching as that world is being scraped away.
Over the past few decades, scientists have been revealing more and more about what lives down there. Life-filled hydrothermal vents that don’t require sunlight. sponge fields with an almost extraterrestrial appearance. On seamounts, cold-water corals have been growing unchecked for 5,000 years. Researchers generally believe that we still know very little, despite the fact that every expedition seems to return with something new. A frontier this large, this ancient, and this delicate all at once is an odd thing.
| Information | Details |
|---|---|
| Organization | Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC) |
| Founded | Early 2000s, formalized around 2004 |
| Type | International alliance of conservation groups |
| Member Organizations | Over 100 international groups |
| Steering Group | Conservation International, Greenpeace, Marine Conservation Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council, Oceana, Pew Charitable Trusts, Seas at Risk |
| Mission | Conservation of biodiversity on the high seas |
| Primary Campaigns | Moratorium on deep-sea mining; ban on high-seas bottom trawling |
| Notable Supporters | Dr. Sylvia Earle, Dr. Callum Roberts, Sigourney Weaver, Dr. David Suzuki |
| Key Threat Identified | Bottom trawling — called the “greatest current threat to seamount ecosystems” by the UN World Ocean Assessment (2021) |
| Notable Win | 2005 GFCM ban on bottom trawling below 1,000m in the Mediterranean |
| Coverage of Concern | Seamounts make up nearly 25% of the world’s seafloor |
For twenty years, the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition—a coalition of over one hundred organizations—has worked to raise awareness of this problem. The Marine Conservation Institute, Greenpeace, Oceana, and Pew are all well-known. Callum Roberts, Sylvia Earle, Sigourney Weaver, and David Suzuki are among the voices. A moratorium on deep-sea mining and an end to high-seas bottom trawling are the two main things they have been advocating for. The first hasn’t really gotten underway. The second has been taking place for years in front of regulators.
The practice that most annoys people when they witness it is bottom trawling. The footage that scientists had been describing for years—heavy, weighted nets dragged across the seafloor, flattening everything in their path—was recently featured in Sir David Attenborough’s film Ocean. In a matter of minutes, seamounts that took millennia to form are reduced to rubble. It’s difficult to watch it without feeling that there is a serious problem with the way we harvest seafood. Economic inertia is the only real defense against it.
Seamounts should receive more attention than they currently receive. They make up about 25% of the world’s seafloor and serve as underwater oases, collecting life, nutrients, and currents in ways that nothing else in the open ocean can. They are close to whales. Turtles and sharks move through. Over thousands of years, cold-water sponges and corals accumulate. The ecosystem does not recover in a season or even a generation after a trawler scrapes one clean. It might not recover at all.
To be fair, there has been some political progress. More than a thousand scientists urged the UN to protect seamounts in a letter they signed in 2004. In response, the UN General Assembly passed resolutions, and a few regional organizations did the same. About 43% of Mediterranean seamounts were protected when the General Fisheries Council of the Mediterranean outlawed bottom trawling below 1,000 meters in 2005. The North Atlantic Fisheries Organization prohibited bottom fishing on its regulated seamounts in 2021. Both are true victories, but they are uneven, regional, and partial. Even as the science has grown more difficult to refute, a few countries continue to permit the practice on the high seas.
Observing this develop, one thing that sticks out is how slowly a problem this obvious has been addressed. It’s not abstract, the deep sea. Commercial fish breed there, carbon is stored there, and life on Earth may have originated there. Decades from now, we might look back on this moment in the same way that we now look back on the early days of deforestation—knowing what was being lost, yet somehow continuing. The scientists continue to write letters. The coalitions continue to form. And the nets continue to drag two miles below the surface.
