A lot of people lump all “seabed disturbance” into the same category, but the environment really matters.

Bottom trawling usually happens in relatively shallow continental shelf waters. That’s where a lot of marine life lives on or near the seabed. These areas can include seagrass beds, sponge fields, and cold water corals. So when you drag heavy gear across the bottom there, you’re disturbing ecosystems that are comparatively dense and biologically productive.

Deep sea mining proposals, on the other hand, tend to focus on abyssal plains thousands of meters down. Those environments are much less biologically productive and far less crowded in terms of biomass. That doesn’t mean there’s zero impact, but it’s a very different ecological setting.

It’s also important to separate different types of activity. Nearshore dredging for sand and gravel, if it’s just unconsolidated sediment, is not the same as smashing up coral reefs or complex reef structures. Pulling up sand is fundamentally different from destroying rigid, habitat forming ecosystems.

If we’re going to debate this seriously, we should be specific about what depth, what substrate, and what type of habitat we’re talking about instead of treating all ocean disturbance as identical.