The Anchorage-based North Pacific Fishery Management Council has jurisdiction over 900,000 square miles of waters off Alaska. It says that the area is home to copious groundfish, which include cod, pollock, flatfish, mackerel, sablefish and rockfish. They have appealed to the U.S. Department of Commerce to convert the Council’s fishery-management plan for Arctic Alaska into a federal rule.
Experts said that the new accord “is a fairly dramatic thing,” and has the backing of commercial U.S. fleets. It is told that even in summer, dangerous ice floes had been a constant peril. But in recent years, summer ice has been disappearing in the Arctic seas. It’s been a constant refrain in the Arctic ever since, with the region’s near-year-round ice cover all but vanishing in late summer. This seasonal loss of sea ice is among the most visible and worrisome, which is early symptom of global warming.
As the summer is waning sea-ice cover, the fishing industry has been veritably chomping at the prospect of a piscine gold rush. According to Benton nations have been assessing who might stake claims to the area’s previously untapped waters. He suspects the hold on Arctic fishing won’t end here. U.S. negotiations are due to begin soon with neighboring Russia and Canada.
