Massive chinese fishing fleet creates “floating city” visible from space, devastating south atlantic marine life

Every year, a colossal fleet of hundreds of industrial fishing vessels descends upon a lawless stretch of ocean just beyond Argentina’s territorial waters, creating what appears from satellite imagery as a glowing city floating on the dark Atlantic. This Chinese-dominated armada targets Mile 201, an ungoverned zone in the South Atlantic where rich marine ecosystems exist outside any nation’s protective jurisdiction.

From a high-tech monitoring center in Buenos Aires, Argentine Coast Guard Commander Mauricio López and his team track the movements of these distant-water fishing vessels in real time across banks of screens. “Every year, for five or six months, the foreign fleet comes from across the Indian Ocean, from Asian countries, and from the North Atlantic,” López explains. “It’s creating a serious environmental problem.”

The massive scale of this operation has earned it the nickname “mad fishing” among environmental observers. These industrial ships, primarily targeting squid and other valuable marine species, operate in international waters where enforcement is nearly impossible and regulations are minimal. The fleet’s sheer size—visible even from space—underscores the industrial-scale extraction of marine resources happening beyond the reach of coastal nations’ protection.

This annual invasion represents a growing crisis in ocean governance, as distant-water fleets exploit regulatory gaps in international waters to harvest marine life at unsustainable rates, potentially devastating local ecosystems that Argentina and other coastal nations depend upon for their own fishing industries and marine biodiversity.