CityNews – The Wall Street Journal has published a small article with a segment of video which highlights something about Thailand that can be noticed from space in a night video of the region.
The Gulf of Thailand’s green lights might be pretty, but have negative environmental effects.
The night video was taken from the International Space Station and released by NASA to compare the contrast of light visible between South and North Korea. Instead, some viewers pointed to something interesting they noticed about Thailand at the very beginning of the video – the large clusters of bright green lights shining from the Gulf of Thailand.
The green lights are from the many fishing boats that work in the area, who use the brightly coloured lights to illuminate the ocean and attract some sea animals, like squid. Thailand is the world’s largest exporter of squid, and squid boats often carry up to a hundred green lamps to suspend underneath the water’s surface.
While the fishing industry is not as robust as it once was in many regions of Southeast Asia in the past few years, it still remains a major threat to those environments. The Gulf of Thailand’s marine life has been severely damaged by over-fishing and modern commercial fishing practices, with many parts of the sea now heavily polluted.