The effects of trawling have been known ever since John Pownall banged on the wind-battered door of a small cottage in the fishing village of Whitstable, southern England, in 1773. So, is the resulting loss of human knowledge an acceptable casualty? And what is its true scale? No legislation guides trawlers on how to avoid historical shipwrecks, and no environmental schemes monitor the scale of discovery and destruction. Fishing is big business.įor decades, the effects of these bulldozers of the deep have raised red flags among marine ecologists, but only now has the conundrum emerged on the radar of underwater archaeologists. This traditional and essential industry annually brings in 80m tons of fish valued at $93.9bn, landed from 4.3m vessels, and employs 44.9m people worldwide. Each year, trawlers rake over ocean floors as large as Brazil, the Congo, and India combined, flattening almost everything in their path. This story conceals a significant problem: the greatest threat to the museums of the deep is not Mother Nature, treasure hunters, or offshore oil pipelines. Local celebrity status and a handsome finder’s fee from the government followed, and his discovery was the star attraction of the World Expo exhibition in Japan. When the rest of the bronze turned up several years later, off Mazara del Vallo, he was glad he did: Adragna had snagged the lost 4th-century BC Greek masterpiece of a dancing satyr – one of the finest ancient statues ever found. The crew of the Italian fishing boat Capitan Ciccio nearly threw it back overboard but the skipper decided to keep it as a souvenir. Sean Kingsley asks: Is global trawling of fragile shipwrecks the greatest threat to underwater heritage today?Ĭaptain Francesco Adragna was ready to give up on the day’s poor catch when his nets dragged up a piece of rusting bronze, about 50 miles (80km) off Sicily.
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