After becoming the world’s first renewable-energy island, Samsø, smack-dab in the middle of Denmark, has turned its attention to another sustainability challenge: restoring the marine life lost to centuries of stone fishing. Where has all the marine life gone? A better question might be: Where has all the habitat gone?
During the last ice age, glaciers deposited billions of boulders across the seabeds of northern Europe, creating rocky habitat for seaweed, mussels, and the fish that depend on them. But over the past several hundred years, the stone-fishing industry dredged up much of that glacial rubble, leaving vast stretches of Danish seabed stripped of its natural structure.
Without hard surfaces to cling to, seaweeds and mussels struggled to establish themselves. And as habitat disappeared, so did some of the creatures that depended on it. Off Samsø, roughly 21 square miles of seafloor were reportedly stripped of stone between 1900 and 2000. The changes were apparent within a generation. “When I was a child, we could fish straight from the beach,” native Michael Kristensen told Adventure.com. “As I grew older, I realized that this was no longer possible because marine habitats had been depleted by stone-fishing.”
By the time the practice was banned in 2010, roughly nine million tons of stone had been removed from Danish waters. For an island that has become an international model for renewable energy, a depleted seabed presented an incongruous problem. So Samsø turned to an old idea with a new purpose: the artificial reef.
Enter BARREEF, a 100-meter-long structure built from 6,000 metric tonnes (~6,600 US tons) of Norwegian granite and installed off the coast near the harbor village of Ballen. The reef is designed to provide new habitat for marine plants and animals while also helping shield the vulnerable coast from storm damage.
In other words, the project aims to do double duty: Give marine life a place to regroup and help protect the people living alongside it.
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BARREEF is part of a broader Danish effort to restore rocky marine habitat. And the potential payoff is considerable. One study published in the Journal of Applied Ecology reportedly found cod numbers increasing by 60 to 129 times within five to six months of reef restoration—a reminder of how quickly marine life can respond when the right habitat returns.
Give an ecosystem the structure it needs, and the opportunity to recover, and life may find its way back faster than you think.
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