Environment & climate
The cod collapse and the emptying of the oceans
10 min
How one of the richest fisheries on Earth was fished to collapse in a few decades, the communities it devastated, and what the long, uncertain recovery teaches about managing shared resources.
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Show notes
Factory freezer trawlers spiked annual cod landings to one point four million metric tons in nineteen sixty-eight.
Government population models overestimated cod biomass by over one hundred percent before the fishery collapsed.
The nineteen ninety-two moratorium caused the largest industrial layoff in Canadian history with forty thousand jobs lost.
Bottom trawling nets weighted with rollers scraped the seafloor and destroyed critical marine habitats.
Newfoundland's ecosystem shifted from cod dominance to shellfish like crab and shrimp after the crash.
The Canadian government ended the thirty-two-year commercial cod fishing moratorium in June twenty twenty-four.
In this episode
- 1Intro1 min
- 2Five Centuries of Abundance2 min
- 3The Industrial Escalation2 min
- 4The Flawed Models and the Crash3 min
- 5The Human and Ecological Cost3 min
- 6Outro1 min
Sources
- Cod fishery collapse of 1992 | Moratorium, Conservation, Economic Effects, & Facts | Britannica
- 500 years of the once largest fishery in the world: A comprehensive catch reconstruction for the Newfoundland cod fishery (1508–2023)
- Cod Moratorium of 1992 | The Canadian Encyclopedia
- Why Haven't the Cod Come Back? - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
- WORK #6 - Emptying an Ocean
- Cod moratorium: How Newfoundland’s cod industry disappeared overnight | Canadian Geographic
- Fish still missing, traditions extinct 30 years after N.L. cod moratorium | CBC News
- Five centuries of cod catches in Eastern Canada
- BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Cod's warning from Newfoundland
- The Grand Banks: Where Have All the Cod Gone
- History of Fisheries in the Northwest Atlantic: The 500-Year Perspective
- https://journal.nafo.int/Portals/0/1998/lear.pdf
- Cod fishing in Newfoundland
- https://uwindsor.scholaris.ca/bitstreams/51ff0608-e45b-4784-bfd4-fd6821adba4f/download
- What Can Be Learned from the Collapse of a Renewable Resource? Atlantic Cod, Gadus morhua , of Newfoundland and Labrador
- History of Fisheries in the Northwest Atlantic: The 500-Year Perspective
- The northern cod crisis (BP-313E)
- Spatial and temporal variation in the density of northern cod and a review of hypotheses for the stock’s collapse
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