Rare May fires break out in Siberia, killing at least 10 Posted 4 hours ago https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05...eak-out-in-siberia-kill-at-least-10/101047572 Winds described as 'violent' frustrate firefighting efforts in Siberia. Fires that have broken out across south-western Siberia have killed at least 10 people and damaged hundreds of buildings, according to local authorities. Key points: Authorities say 300 firefighters are battling blazes in difficult conditions Rare fires in May have been attributed to a lack of rain and strong winds Forest-rich Siberia has suffered from unprecedented fires for several years Hundreds of firefighters are trying to contain the blazes, which are a rare occurrence in the region during May and have been fuelled by a lack of rain and fierce winds, they said. In the Krasnoyarsk region, at least five people lost their lives in the fires, which damaged about 450 homes, the local authorities said, declaring a state of emergency. In the Kemerovo region, three people were found dead in a burnt home. In the Omsk region, two people died. The Siberan town of Zaozyorny lays devastated by forest fires.(AFP: Russian Emergencies Ministry) "Extinguishing [the fires] is being complicated by meteorological conditions. Violent winds are fanning the flames and preventing them from being put out," the regional ministry for emergencies in Krasnoyarsk said on Telegram. Regional governor Alexander Uss said gales of up to 40 metres per second had brought down trees and power lines across large swathes of the Krasnoyarsk region, sparking the fires. Authorities said 300 firemen backed by 90 vehicles were fighting the flames. "We have called for help from neighbouring territories but are aware that will in the best case not arrive for some hours," said Mr Uss, adding temporary shelters were being opened for people in the worst-hit areas. "I have given the order to cut off electricity in part of the region — save for survival facilities, service stations and water supply systems," he said. The city of Krasnoyarsk is covered with smoke from wildfires.(Reuters: Alexander Manzyuk) Roman Vilfand, of Russia's Hydrometeorological Research Centre, told the TASS news agency that such fires were rare in May. "But there hasn't been rain for a long time, there were fires, and then strong wind," he said. Forest-rich Siberia has suffered from unprecedented fires for several years. Last year, they belched 16 million tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere, according to an annual European climate report. AFP
Meet the guy who wants to help save the planet with thousands of buoys, seaweed and giant antacids By Bill Weir, CNN Chief Climate Correspondent May 22, 2022 https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/22/us/seaweed-carbon-capture-xprize-finalist-climate/index.html Marty Odlin, the CEO of Running Tide, wants to absorb carbon dioxide from the air and sea with a network of kelp-growing bouys. PORTLAND, Maine (CNN)Marty Odlin just wanted to go fishing. As a kid growing up on the Gulf of Maine, he'd jump from boat to boat on Portland docks humming with the kind of energy that once hauled hundreds of thousands of pounds of cod into port each day. "People were making money," Odlin wistfully told CNN. "People were taking risks. Starting businesses, building boats, making nets. Just constant activity." Even as he went off to study robotics at Dartmouth College and earth systems at Columbia University, he still dreamed of his own mackerel rig and even had a name picked out -- Running Tide. But when it came time to take out a boat loan, "I just couldn't make the math work," Marty said. "The climate risks were so high. There just aren't any mackerel. They all swam to Iceland." Overfishing wiped out the abundance of cod in the 1980s and '90s, until catch limits were eventually reduced by 95%. But while fishing has always been a boom-or-bust game, what keeps Odlin awake is the worry that the booms are over forever. Not just because the water is so warm that they are finding more and more Caribbean trigger fish in lobster traps, but because every ton of fossil fuel burned also makes the sea more acidic. "The ocean is the is like the womb for fish. All their eggs are external, and those booms come when the chemistry of the ocean is just right for that species," he said. "If it was just overfishing, we would have seen the stocks rebound, and we haven't seen them rebound. And I think that it's pretty clear that that's just due to how drastically we've altered the chemistry of the ocean. And I was like, 'What am I going to do about that?' And you either give up or you get kind of mad, you know?" Meet the fisherman who could win $100M from Elon Musk Instead of chasing monster mackerel on a boat named Running Tide, Odlin started a company called Running Tide to help solve the problem. At first it was just Odlin and a friend sitting on buckets and noodling engineering ideas on a white board they found by the road. Now they have billionaire investors and a team of engineers, biologists, agronomists, fabricators, software developers, data specialists and boat captains. Together they're trying to hook a kind of monster -- carbon dioxide. "It's a Godzilla," Odlin said. "It's burning forests down. It's stealing our fish. It's devastating our crops. It's hurting our farmers. All the stuff that's free and fun is getting ruined. We should get mad and go kill that thing. Right?" Thousands of buoys and seaweed microforests "Carbon capture and sequestration," or CCS, is hardly the term that rolls off the tongue at dinner parties -- even in the age of increasing unnatural disasters. But if humanity hopes to maintain a livable planet, science agrees that billions of tons of CO2 must be removed from the air and ocean and locked away, ASAP. This means CCS must grow from an industry worth a few billion in 2022 to a trillion dollars a year by 2030. The Department of Energy recently announced a $3.5 billion program to accelerate the development of four direct air capture facilities around the United States -- factory-sized vacuum cleaners, each capable of capturing one million tons of CO2 per year. But considering the most successful carbon removal facility in the world so far -- Iceland's Climeworks -- can pull down fewer than 4,000 tons annually, it could be decades before that goal is met. On the private sector side, Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify is among the tech companies pledging to prepurchase $1 billion worth of carbon credits from startups like Running Tide, with the hope that other corporations will follow. And on Earth Day 2021, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his $100 million XPRIZE for carbon removal. "Let's say you think it's 99.9% likely that adding all the CO2 to the oceans and atmosphere is going to be fine, so there's a 0.1% chance of disaster," Musk said while livestreaming his XPRIZE announcement on YouTube from an undisclosed jungle. "Well, there's only one Earth and even a 0.1% chance of disaster, why take that risk?" Seaweed is a ravenous consumer of carbon dioxide, and scientists have been eyeing it as one potential solution to the climate crisis. Musk said he was out to find the smartest, most cost-effective means and markets to capture carbon. Just over a year later, Running Tide and its fisherman/CEO is among the finalists. While some inventors brought designs for massive chemical or mechanical machines, Odlin hopes to harness and supercharge the natural cycles and design features of the ocean he knows so well. Running Tide may employ a number of engineers with PhDs and patents, but their tentpole technologies are oysters, limestone and seaweed. The centerpiece idea is a network of thousands of buoys floating in the North Atlantic, each holding a microforest of seaweed and a few pounds of limestone. The seaweed will gobble up carbon from the air and water, and the limestone will serve as an antacid for the surface layer of the sea -- like a Tums for the ocean. With the shape of a small robot, a buoy's solar panels would power a cloud-connected camera and instruments to monitor kelp growth and water chemistry, a data feed vital for future carbon markets. When a seaweed crop is cut, it will sink to the deep ocean where all the CO2 those plants absorbed will remain buried in sediment for thousands of years. The company is also building floating oyster farms, which filter millions of gallons of seawater while growing a marketable source of protein and capturing carbon in the shells at the same time. A few oysters on a plate or a pile of kelp on the beach can seem like such tiny weapons against a carbon "Godzilla," but Odlin dreams of goosing their natural powers with the latest in biotech and building them to a massive scale on the same Maine docks where his ancestors built ships to beat Hitler. "We grew up on these stories of heroism and sacrifice. Well, it's time now," Odlin said. "What are we waiting for? All this anxiety, all this frustration that people have, it's just because we haven't been unleashed. I'm such an optimist when it comes to the potential of the of the American spirit. We just have to be unleashed."
World's biggest plant discovered off Australian coast By Tiffanie Turnbull BBC News, Sydney https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-61655327 Image source, Rachel Austin Image caption, The seagrass covers an area the size of about 20,000 football fields, researchers say The largest known plant on Earth - a seagrass roughly three times the size of Manhattan - has been discovered off the coast of Australia. Using genetic testing, scientists have determined a large underwater meadow in Western Australia is in fact one plant. It is believed to have spread from a single seed over at least 4,500 years. The seagrass covers about 200 sq km (77 sq miles), researchers from the University of Western Australia said. The team stumbled upon the discovery by accident at Shark Bay, about 800km north of Perth. They had set out to understand the genetic diversity of the species - also known as ribbon weed - which is commonly found along parts of Australia's coast. Researchers collected shoots from across the bay and examined 18,000 genetic markers to create a "fingerprint" from each sample. They had aimed to discover how many plants made up the meadow. "The answer blew us away - there was just one!" said Jane Edgeloe, the study's lead author. "That's it, just one plant has expanded over 180km in Shark Bay, making it the largest known plant on Earth." Image source, Angela Rossen Image caption, An aerial view of the plant in Shark Bay, Western Australia The plant is also remarkable for its hardiness, having grown in locations across the bay with wildly variable conditions. "It appears to be really resilient, experiencing a wide range of temperatures and salinities plus extreme high light conditions, which together would typically be highly stressful for most plants," said Dr Elizabeth Sinclair, one of the researchers. The species generally grows like a lawn at a rate of up to 35cm a year. This is how researchers estimated it has taken 4,500 years to sprawl to its current size.
Atmospheric CO2 more than 50 percent higher than pre-industrial era A girl stands near a power plant in Dadri in India -- the main US climate agency says CO2 levels in the atmosphere are at their highest level for four million years AFP 6:36AM June 4, 2022 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/ne...a/news-story/a214b4f589f5eef01b34d2e441507357 Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in May were 50 percent higher than during the pre-industrial era, reaching levels not seen on Earth for about four million years, the main US climate agency said on Friday. Global warming caused by humans, particularly through the production of electricity using fossil fuels, transport, the production of cement, or even deforestation, is responsible for the new high, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said. In May 2022, the threshold of 420 parts per million (ppm) -- a unit of measurement used to quantify pollution in the atmosphere -- was crossed. The measurements are taken at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, ideally located high on a volcano, which allows it to escape the possible influence of local pollution. The level now is comparable to what it was between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when CO2 levels were near or above 400 ppm, the agency said in a statement. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that traps heat, gradually causing global warming. It remains in the atmosphere and oceans for thousands of years. "Carbon dioxide is at levels our species has never experienced before — this is not new," said Pieter Tans, a scientist with the Global Monitoring Laboratory.
‘Silent killer of our brain’: Dementia experts warn about road pollution By Liam Mannix September 16, 2022 Air pollution has emerged as a small but important risk factor for dementia and cognitive decline, experts say – and Australia probably has a false sense of security about how clean our air is. One of Australia’s leading dementia epidemiologists says she would no longer live on a busy road after watching the science linking air pollution and dementia strengthen over the past two decades. Professor Kaarin Anstey.Credit:Nick Moir She’s even come to worry about cyclists pedalling along the side of highways. “All the observational studies keep showing a cognitive decline is associated with high levels of air pollution,” says Professor Kaarin Anstey, director of the University of NSW Ageing Futures Institute and senior principal research scientist at Neuroscience Research Australia. “There has been study after study.” In the early 2000s, researchers in heavily polluted Mexico City discovered an association between children living in more polluted areas and inflammation of the brain. Subsequent studies have shown a small but consistent association with neurodegeneration in children and adults across small neighbourhoods and large countries. Sydney was swathed in smoke from the bushfires in the summer of 2019.Credit:Renee Nowytarger But conclusively proving one caused the other is very difficult. The most compelling evidence emerged in February, when a Chinese study showed people living in provinces with policies to cut air pollution had less cognitive decline over four years than people living in provinces without such policies. One in eight Australians aged between 80 and 84 has dementia. Large reviews now suggest exposure to high levels of air pollution increases the risk of dementia by about 10 per cent. That’s behind other risks such as obesity, smoking, diabetes or depression, but far more people are exposed. Health authorities are taking aggressive steps to deal with other risks, but air pollution seems to be largely ignored, says Professor Hui Chen, who is studying the effect of air pollution on fetal development for the University of Technology Sydney. “The evidence is quite strong,” says Professor Hui Chen. “It [pollution] is a silent killer of our brain. People don’t really realise this is in the air.” Credit:Louise Kennerley “The evidence is quite strong,” she says. “It is a silent killer of our brain. People don’t really realise this is in the air.” Chen is talking about PM2.5 – a catch-all measure of particles 30 times smaller than a human hair. That’s small enough to get through the lungs and into the blood, “and then pretty much go everywhere”, she says. PM2.5 particles have been linked to increased blood pressure and stroke risk, which can indirectly cause dementia. But like any foreign particle, they can also trigger an inflammatory immune response. “And we know inflammatory responses can impact on the start and progression of neurodegeneration,” says Professor Kevin Barnham, head of the neurotherapeutics lab at the Florey Institute. Barnham points to rates of Parkinson disease, which increased by 22 per cent between 1990 and 2016 – from 2.75 deaths per 100,000 to 4.69 – even after accounting for the ageing of the population. “The rise in incidence of Parkinson’s disease has been described as a pandemic,” he says. “The only thing we can pin it down to is environmental exposure.” The WA town of Cockburn, south of Perth, has been ranked the fourth worst air polluted town in Australia. Professor Bryce Vissel, head of the Centre for Neuroscience and Regenerative Medicine, says it is “absolutely clear” that particulate matter gets into and deposits in the brain. “And [the particles] are clearly from engines,” Vissel says. “They are found in amyloid deposits. In mice exposed to polluted air collected from busy roads, they show biological changes relevant to brain damage.” Studies overseas have shown women living in polluted areas bear children who perform less well at school and Professor Chen has been trying to find out if that is happening here as well. “No one was doing these studies in Australia because they thought our air quality was so good,” she says. “But now they know it is a problem.“ Official air-quality sensors are designed to measure background air quality so can overstate how good Australia’s air is in locations where people spend lots of time, such as along roads. Monitors are typically placed in parks away from roads where they can pick up large-scale pollution events, such as haze from bushfires. “They are not measuring often elevated levels of pollution in locations where many people in cities spend time, particularly near roads,” says the University of Wollongong’s Dr Hugh Forehead. He led a project fitting air-quality sensors around streets in western Sydney that found PM2.5 measures were 10 times higher there than at official monitoring stations. This may leave us with a false sense of security that our air is cleaner than it is, says Associate Professor Anthony White. He heads a team looking at neurodegeneration at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute. In lab studies, they have shown that bushfire smoke – of the type that blanketed Sydney for weeks in 2019 – is especially toxic to brain cells. “It’s a fairly small magnitude of risk,” he says. “But there are a lots of things that add risk to dementia, and if you combine them all that adds up over a lifetime.
The Godwit’s Long, Long Nonstop Journey Researchers marvel at the bird’s record-holding migratory flight of 7,000 or so miles from Alaska to New Zealand at this time of year. No eating or refueling along the way. Looking for an endless summer, the bar-tailed godwit flies 7,000 miles each year, from Alaska to New Zealand, to breed and raise its young. Credit... Malcolm Schuyl/Alamy By Jim Robbins Sept. 20, 2022 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/science/migratory-birds-godwits.html Tens of thousands of bar-tailed godwits are taking advantage of favorable winds this month and next for their annual migration from the mud flats and muskeg of southern Alaska, south across the vast expanse of the Pacific Ocean, to the beaches of New Zealand and eastern Australia. They are making their journey of more than 7,000 miles by flapping night and day, without stopping to eat, drink or rest. “The more I learn, the more amazing I find them,” said Theunis Piersma, a professor of global flyway ecology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and an expert in the endurance physiology of migratory birds. “They are a total evolutionary success.” The godwit’s epic flight — the longest nonstop migration of a land bird in the world — lasts from eight to 10 days and nights through pounding rain, high winds and other perils. It is so extreme, and so far beyond what researchers knew about long-distance bird migration, that it has required new investigations. In a recent paper, a group of researchers said the arduous journeys challenge “underlying assumptions of bird physiology, orientation, and behavior,” and listed 11 questions posed by such migrations. Dr. Piersma called the pursuit of answers to these questions “the new ornithology.” The extraordinary nature of what bar-tailed and other migrating birds accomplish has been revealed in the last 15 years or so with improvements to tracking technology, which has given researchers the ability to follow individual birds in real time and in a detailed way along the full length of their journey. “You know where a bird is almost to the meter, you know how high it is, you know what it’s doing, you know its wing-beat frequency,” Dr. Piersma said. “It’s opened a whole new world.” A flock of bar-tailed godwits in New Zealand, where the food is abundant and predatory falcons are scarce.Credit...Peregrine/Alamy (Sea-faring Polynesian cultures, the scientists wrote in the paper, knew about the migrations long ago and used the birds to assist in navigation.) The known distance record for a godwit migration is 13,000 kilometers, or nearly 8,080 miles. It was set last year by an adult male bar-tailed godwit with a tag code of 4BBRW that encountered inclement weather on his way to New Zealand and veered off course to a more distant landing in Australia. He had flapped his wings for 237 hours without stopping when he touched down. (In the last week, he has left Alaska again and is en route to his southern destination.) Other birds do stay aloft for long periods using a technique called “dynamic soaring,” while godwits power themselves by continuous flapping, which takes far more energy. The globe-trotting birds are in search of an endless summer, and some 90,000 or so depart Alaska from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and environs, where they breed and raise their young. Both Alaska and New Zealand are rich in foods that godwits like, especially the insects in Alaska for newly hatched chicks. And New Zealand has no predatory falcons, while Alaska offers secure habitat. Once they reach New Zealand and the austral summer, the sleek birds — with mottled brown-and-white aerodynamic wings; cinnamon-colored breasts; long, slender beaks; and stilt-like legs — feed on glistening mud flats until March, when they begin their journey back north. New Zealanders welcome the arrival of thousands of bar-tailed godwits. The cathedral at Christchurch would ring its bells to greet the birds until an earthquake toppled the bell tower in 2011.Credit...Mark Baker/Associated Press The birds are cherished by many New Zealanders. The cathedral at Christchurch began ringing its bells to welcome the birds, but an earthquake in 2011 toppled the bell tower. Another cathedral in the city of Nelson has taken over the task and will ring its bells for the birds later this month. “I tell people try exercising for nine straight days — not stopping, not eating, not drinking — to convey what’s going on here,” said Robert E. Gill Jr., a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Anchorage who has studied the birds in Alaska since 1976. “It stretches the imagination.” Distances vary, but all told, in a year, the godwits cover some 30,000 kilometers, or nearly 18,720 miles, because they take a less direct route to return north in March. They fly nonstop from New Zealand to China’s Yellow Sea and its rich tidal flats, where they refuel, and then return to Alaska. And they are proficient at the incredibly risky endeavor; the survival rate is more than 90 percent. “It’s not really like a marathon,” said Christopher Guglielmo, an animal physiologist at Western University in London, Ontario, who studies avian endurance physiology. “It’s more like a trip to the moon.” The journey of these ultra-endurance athletes is made possible by a suite of adaptations. Bar-tailed godwits are avian shape-shifters, whose internal organs go through a “strategic restructuring” before departure. Their gizzards, kidneys, livers and guts shrink to lighten the load for the journey.Credit...Thomas Hanahoe/Alamy Godwits are avian shape-shifters, endowed with an unusual plasticity. Their internal organs undergo a “strategic restructuring” before departure. The gizzards, kidneys, livers and guts shrink to lighten the load for the trans-Pacific journey. Pectoral muscles grow before takeoff to support the constant flapping the trip requires. They are built for speed, with aerodynamic wings and a missile-shaped body. The only baggage the birds carry is fat, by gobbling up insects, worms and mollusks to double their weight from one to two pounds before embarking on their trip. Because godwits directly use fat to fuel their flight, Dr. Guglielmo in one paper called them “obese super athletes.” Bird lungs are the most efficient lungs of any vertebrate and help the godwits’ performance in the thin atmosphere of higher altitudes. Bar-tailed godwits in Russia have recently been documented flying at altitudes of three to four miles above ground. No other birds make the same length of powered migration under such punishing conditions, but recent research shows that common swifts stay airborne for virtually all of the 10 months when they’re not breeding or nesting, although they eat and drink during that time. Climate change and other factors are bearing down on migratory shorebirds around the world. In Alaska, for example, rising sea levels are lapping at the nesting sites of godwits and important grassy habitat is being ‘shrub-ified’ — taken over by shrubs — because of warmer temperatures. Experts are also worried about avian influenza, which has spread globally among wild birds this year and is often lethal. Wayfinding among the godwits is among the biggest questions recent studies have prompted. “What mechanisms explain birds acting as if they possess a Global Positioning System?” researchers asked. Crossing a nearly featureless Pacific Ocean without navigational cues required an internal “map to define position and a compass to tell direction,” they said. The birds find their way back to the same specific sites at the end of their flight, something they do for each of the 15 or 20 years of their lives. “They have figured out the aerosphere they live in,” Dr. Gill said. “They can predict when to leave and when not to leave, how high to fly, and they know exactly where they are and they know their destination.” The godwits probably rely on several cues for navigation, especially the sun and stars. Some experts believe that they may be able to sense magnetic lines on the planet through a process called quantum entanglement. The birds also possess an uncanny knack for weather forecasting. “They know what conditions to leave on that will not only provide wind at the start that is favorable, but throughout their entire flight,” Dr. Gill said. “They can piece the puzzle together in terms of what the conditions are in Alaska and between there and Hawaii, between Hawaii and Fiji, and between Fiji and New Zealand. How migration abilities are passed on to the next generation — whether genetically or learned or a combination — is still unknown. “You study adults, and you think these birds just have it down, they are super robots, they are amazing,” said Jesse Conklin, an independent researcher at the University of Groningen who studies the species. “But when you study young birds, they make mistakes and do all kinds of weird stuff. So they weren’t just born with this routine.” Incredibly, it is possible that three-month-old godwit juveniles fly their nonstop maiden voyage without adult supervision. That has yet to be confirmed. The energetics of their nonstop migration are also a conundrum. Current models say the birds should conk out after three or four days, yet they fly for more than a week. “We can’t explain the physiology that allows them to do this,” Dr. Guglielmo said. “We know what the energy costs should be from wind tunnel experiments, but when we try to use our models, the energy costs we know they used are much lower.” The birds use half or less of the energy expected. One answer may be that the birds can lower their metabolic rate on these journeys, burning far less energy than they would for other kinds of flying. “Are they going into a suspended animation state when they are doing these monster flights?” Dr. Guglielmo asked. “I don’t think they are in a normal physiological state when they are doing this,” he said, adding they might enter into a state like something akin to “marathon runners getting into the zone.” Whether or how the birds sleep is another mystery. It’s been shown that some bird species are capable of unihemispheric sleep, that is, putting one half of their brain to bed while using the other half to fly. Others believe the birds don’t sleep at all but catch up on their rest when they reach New Zealand. Experts believe the birds communicate frequently, especially about the timing and safety of their trip. Some suggest that the birds gather to create a kind of group mind that helps them make decisions on important matters and take votes on migration, among other things. “It’ll be near hurricane weather and a bird will be stamping around the estuary, calling, trying to get someone to go with her,” Dr. Conklin said. “I watched a bird do this for five days straight. Her clock said go, and everybody else said no. She got outvoted.” She stayed, he said, “but as soon as the weather turned, she was in the first flock out.”
Yep, that's it exactly. They sleep on the wing while gliding. Sharks do the same thing. Half their brain sleep while the other half keeps them gliding through the water, because they need constant motion through the water to breathe. I have watched ospreys in nests fall asleep for moments at a time, on and off, on an off, and that is there way of sleeping. I can totally understand uni-hemispheric sleep while in flight.
How China Targets the Global Fish Supply By Steven Lee Myers, Agnes Chang, Derek Watkins and Claire Fu Sept. 26, 2022 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/26/world/asia/china-fishing-south-america.html With its own coastal waters depleted, China has built a global fishing operation unmatched by any other country. Rich and ecologically diverse, the waters around the Galápagos Islands have attracted local fishermen for centuries. Now, these waters face a much larger, more rapacious hunter: China. Chinese fishing in ⬤ 2020 and ⬤ 2021. The Galápagos are part of Ecuador. And yet each year growing numbers of Chinese commercial ships, thousands of miles from home, fish here, at times right on the edge of Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone. The Chinese ships since 2016 have operated off South America virtually all day, all year, moving with the seasons from the coasts of Ecuador to Peru … … and eventually to Argentina, where they have fished for what amounts collectively to more than 16,000 days already this year. The scale has raised alarms about the harm to the local economies and the environment, as well as the commercial sustainability of tuna, squid and other species. Note: Data for 2020 is from June 2020 through May 2021; for 2021, it is from June 2021 through May 2022. Over the last two decades, China has built the world’s largest deep-water fishing fleet, by far, with nearly 3,000 ships. Having severely depleted stocks in its own coastal waters, China now fishes in any ocean in the world, and on a scale that dwarfs some countries’ entire fleets near their own waters. The impact is increasingly being felt from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific, from the coasts of Africa to those off South America — a manifestation on the high seas of China’s global economic might. A Chinese ship fishing for squid off the west coast of South America in July 2021. Isaac Haslam/Sea Shepherd via Associated Press The Chinese effort has prompted diplomatic and legal protests. The fleet has also been linked to illegal activity, including encroaching on other countries’ territorial waters, tolerating labor abuses and catching endangered species. In 2017, Ecuador seized a refrigerated cargo ship, the Fu Yuan Yu Leng 999, carrying an illicit cargo of 6,620 sharks, whose fins are a delicacy in China. Much of what China does, however, is legal — or, on the open seas at least, largely unregulated. Given the growing demands of an increasingly prosperous consumer class in China, it is unlikely to end soon. That doesn’t mean it is sustainable. In the summer of 2020, the conservation group Oceana counted nearly 300 Chinese ships operating near the Galápagos, just outside Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone, the 200 nautical miles off its territory where it maintains rights to natural resources under the Law of the Sea Treaty. The ships hugged the zone so tightly that satellite mapping of their positions traced the zone’s boundary. Together, they accounted for nearly 99 percent of the fishing near the Galápagos. No other country came close. Note: “Other countries” are 35 entities including South Korea, Spain and Taiwan. Data is for the high seas within 50 nautical miles (about 57 miles) of the Ecuador, Peru and Argentina’s exclusive economic zones. Fishing activity near the disputed exclusive economic zone of the Falkland Islands was omitted. Data for 2022 is through May 31. By The New York Times “Our sea can’t handle this pressure anymore,” said Alberto Andrade, a fisherman from the Galápagos. The presence of so many Chinese vessels, he added, has made it harder for local fishermen inside Ecuador’s territorial waters, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Mr. Andrade has organized a group of fishermen, the Island Front for the Galápagos Marine Reserve, to call for the expansion of fishery protections around the islands. “The industrial fleets are razing the stocks, and we are afraid that in the future there will be no more fishery,” he said. “Not even the pandemic stopped them.” An Industrial Effort China can fish on such an industrial scale because of vessels like Hai Feng 718, a refrigerated cargo ship built in Japan in 1996. It is registered in Panama and managed by a company in Beijing called Zhongyu Global Seafood Corporation. Its owner is a state-owned enterprise: the China National Fisheries Corporation. The Hai Feng 718, a Chinese-owned carrier ship. Chinese National Fisheries Corporation Hai Feng 718 is known as a carrier vessel, or mothership. It has refrigerated storage holds to preserve tons of catch. It also carries fuel and other supplies for smaller ships that can unload their hauls and resupply their crews at sea. As a result, the other vessels do not need to spend time returning to port, allowing them to fish almost continuously. Over the course of a year beginning June 2021, the Hai Feng 718 met at least 70 smaller Chinese-flagged fishing vessels in various locations at sea, according to Global Fishing Watch, a research organization that assembles location data from ship transponders. Each encounter, known as a transshipment, represents the transfer of tons of fish that the smaller ships would have had to unload in port hundreds of miles away. Together the vessels followed the coasts of South America in what has become a year-round pursuit of catch. Note: Data is from June 2021 through May 2022. By The New York Times After leaving Weihai, a port town in China’s Shandong Province, the Hai Feng 718 arrived in the Galápagos in August 2021 and spent nearly a month in the waters off Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone. There it serviced numerous ships like the Hebei 8588. Such vessels are designed for catching squid, one of the prizes for the fleet. The lights the ships use at night to lure squid to the surface are so bright they can be tracked from space. A month later, the Chinese fleet traveled to the coast of Peru, where the Hai Feng 718 sidled up to more than two dozen smaller vessels, some of them multiple times, including, again, the Hebei 8588. Loaded with catch, the mothership returned to China. By last December, it was at sea again, this time heading west through the Indian Ocean. It arrived off the coast of Argentina for the start of the squid season there in January. In May, it was once again off the coast of the Galápagos. Routes of vessels that encountered Hai Feng 718 in one year Vessels that stayed near the coast of South America Other vessels Note: Data is from June 2021 through May 2022. By The New York Times These operations have allowed a boom in the squid harvest. Between 1990 and 2019, the number of deep-water squid boats soared from six to 528, while the annual reported catch rose from about 5,000 tons to 278,000, according to a report this year by Global Fishing Watch. In 2019, China accounted for nearly all the squid boats operating in the South Pacific. The arrangement of transferring catch to another vessel is not illegal, but according to experts, the use of the motherships makes it easy to underreport the catch and disguise its origins. Other places also deploy deep-water fleets, including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, but none do so on the scale of China. The Hai Feng 718 alone has more than 500,000 cubic feet of cargo space, enough to carry thousands of tons of fish. Transshipment allows fishing vessels to stay at sea year-round Parked side by side, carrier vessels exchange fuel, crew supplies and the catch from fishing vessels. This allows fishing ships to fish for longer periods. Fish hold where fish is transported from Fender to maintain a safe distance between ships Transshipment between a squid fishing vessel and a cargo carrier in the North Indian Ocean last year. Source: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations By The New York Times; Photograph by Fernanda Ligabue/Greenpeace Global Fishing Watch has tracked scores of unexplained “loitering events,” where larger ships linger in one area without any recorded meetings between the carriers and smaller ships. Experts warn that the smaller ships may be turning off their transponders to avoid detection to disguise illegal or unregulated catch. The impact on certain species like squid off the coast of South America is difficult to measure exactly. In some regions, like the South Pacific, international agreements require countries to report their haul, though underreporting is believed to be common. In the South Atlantic, there is no such agreement. There are already worrisome signs of diminishing stocks, which could foreshadow a broader ecological collapse. “The concern is the sheer number of ships and the lack of accountability, to know how much is being fished out and where it’s going to,” said Marla Valentine, an oceanographer with Oceana, the conservation group. “And I’m worried that the impacts that are happening now are going to cascade into the future. “Because it’s not just the squid that are going to be affected,” she added. “It’s going to be everything that feeds on the squid, too.” The Global Backlash The appearance of the Chinese fleet on the edge of the Galápagos in 2020 focused international attention on the industrial scale of China’s fishing fleet. Ecuador lodged a protest in Beijing. Its president at the time, Lenín Moreno, vowed on Twitter to defend the marine sanctuary, which he called “a seedbed of life for the entire planet.” China has responded with offers of concessions. It announced moratoriums on fishing in certain areas, though critics noted that the restrictions apply to seasons when the fish are not as abundant. It vowed to cap the size of its deep-water fleet, though not to reduce it, and to trim the government subsidies it provides fishing companies, many still state-owned or controlled. In the year that followed the furor over the Galápagos, the bulk of the Chinese fleet kept a greater distance from Ecuador’s exclusive economic zone. Otherwise it continued to fish as much as before. A Chinese squid ship near the Galápagos Islands last year. Joshua Goodman/Associated Press In Argentina, a group of environmentalists, supported by the Gallifrey Foundation, an ocean conservation organization, filed an injunction with the country’s top court last year in the hope of prodding the government to do more to comply with its constitutional obligations to protect the environment. They plan to submit a similar injunction in the coming months in Ecuador. “We have a permanent Chinese fleet 200 miles off our coast,” said Pablo Ferrara, a lawyer and professor at the University of Salvador in Buenos Aires, referring to the distance covered by Argentina’s exclusive economic zone. Argentina’s navy, which sank a Chinese fishing boat inside the zone in 2016, has since announced it would add four new patrol ships to step up its enforcement efforts in its coastal waters. The United States, too, has pledged to assist smaller nations to counter China’s illegal or unregulated fishing practices. The U.S. Coast Guard, which now calls the practice one of the greatest security threats in the oceans, has dispatched patrol ships to the South Pacific. In July, President Biden issued a national security memorandum pledging to increase monitoring of the industry. Speaking virtually at a forum of Pacific nations that month, Vice President Kamala Harris said the United States would triple American assistance to help the nations patrol their waters, offering $60 million a year for the next decade. Such efforts may help in territorial waters, but they do little to restrict China’s fleet on the open seas. The consumption of fish worldwide continues to rise, reaching a record high in 2019. At the same time, the known stocks of most species of fish continue to decline, according to the latest report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. “The challenge is to persuade China that it, too, has a need to ensure the long-range sustainability of the ocean’s resources,” said Duncan Currie, an international environmental lawyer who advises the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition. “It’s not going to be there forever.” Source and notes: Global Fishing Watch provided information on fishing activity, transshipment and vessels, based on Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) ship transponder data. The International Maritime Organization and other management bodies require large ships such as commercial fishing vessels to broadcast their positions with AIS. While only 2 percent of the world’s roughly 2.9 million fishing vessels carry AIS, they are responsible for as much as 80 percent of the fishing on the high seas. Vessel types and transshipment events were identified by Global Fishing Watch through methods described here and here. Denise Lu, Weiyi Cai and José Maria León Cabrera contributed reporting.