Mediterranean Sea

• 1. Introduction

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  The Mediterranean Sea holds about 2,500,000 square kilometers of water, yet that represents only 0.7% of the global ocean surface. It sits almost completely enclosed by land, hemmed in by the Levant to the east, Anatolia and Southern Europe to the north, and North Africa to the south. At the Strait of Gibraltar, only 14 kilometers separate the Iberian Peninsula from Morocco. Through that narrow gap, the sea touches the Atlantic Ocean. Around 5.9 million years ago, that gateway closed, and the sea was partly or completely dried out over roughly 600,000 years. How does a sea that once vanished become an incubator of Western civilization? Why have so many peoples given it so many names? And why, in our own century, has it been called a graveyard? Twenty countries ring its shores, from Spain clockwise to Morocco, and beneath its surface lie undersea volcanoes, the deepest point a body of evaporite salts three kilometers thick. The water here remembers more than the land around it.

• 2. A Sea Of Many Names

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  Romans called it Mare Magnum, the Great Sea, and Mare Internum, the Internal Sea, before the Roman Empire settled on Mare Nostrum, Our Sea. The term Mare Mediterraneum came later. Solinus apparently used it in the 3rd century, but the earliest surviving witness is the 6th-century writer Isidore of Seville. The Latin word means 'in the middle of land, inland', a compound of medius, terra, and the suffix -aneus. It is a calque of the Greek mesogeios, and the original meaning may have been 'the sea in the middle of the earth' rather than 'the sea enclosed by land'.

  Color governed several of these names. According to Johann Knobloch, cultures in the Levant once used colors for the cardinal points: black for north, yellow or blue for east, red for south, and white for west. That logic explains the Turkish Akdeniz, 'the White Sea', and the Modern Arabic name al-Bahr al-Abyad al-Mutawassit, 'the White Middle Sea'. In Islamic and older Arabic literature it was Bahr al-Rum, the Sea of the Romans, a name that first meant only the Eastern Mediterranean before spreading to the whole.

  The Ancient Egyptians called it Wadj-wr, a word first applied to the papyrus marshes north of the Nile Delta and then extended to the sea beyond. In the Hebrew Bible it was primarily HaYam HaGadol, the Great Sea, and sometimes simply 'The Sea'. The Old English name was Wendel-sae, the Vandal Sea, after the Vandals who had occupied the North African shores during the Migration Period. One Old Norse name appears to have been Jorsalahaf, the Sea of Jerusalem. The Carthaginians, by contrast, called it the Syrian Sea.

• 3. Incubator Of Civilizations

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  The Levant in the Eastern Mediterranean was among the first regions on earth to show permanent human habitation, as early as 12,000 BC. From there the sea became a route for merchants, travelers, and migrants in antiquity, carrying trade and conquest between peoples. The earliest advanced civilizations along its shores were the Egyptians and the Minoans, who traded extensively with one another. Around 1200 BC the Bronze Age Collapse struck the eastern Mediterranean, destroying many cities and trade routes.

  Darius I of Persia, having conquered Ancient Egypt, built a canal linking the Red Sea to the Nile and so to the Mediterranean. His canal was wide enough for two triremes to pass each other with oars extended, and it took four days to traverse. After the Punic Wars of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, the Roman Republic defeated the Carthaginians to dominate the Western Mediterranean. When Augustus founded the Roman Empire, the Romans named the sea Mare Nostrum.

  For the next 400 years Rome controlled the entire sea and nearly all its coasts, from Gibraltar to the Levant, earning the water the nickname 'Roman Lake'. Rome remains the only state ever to have controlled all of the Mediterranean coast. That total grip would not survive the fall of the Western Roman Empire around 476 AD.

• 4. Crossroads Of Empires

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  In the 7th century a new power arose alongside the religion of Islam, sweeping in from the east. At its greatest extent the Arabs, under the Umayyads, controlled the Iberian Peninsula. With them came a transformation of the table. Sugarcane, rice, cotton, alfalfa, oranges, lemons, apricots, spinach, eggplants, carrots, saffron, and bananas reached Spain and Sicily through the commercial networks of the Islamic world. The Spanish words for oil and olive, aceite and aceituna, both derive from the Arabic al-zait, 'olive juice'.

  The Cairo Geniza documents reveal that the Fatimids traded with Italian city-states before the Crusades. A document dated 996 mentions Amalfian merchants living in Cairo, and the caliph al-Mustansir allowed Amalfian merchants to reside in Jerusalem around 1060. The Crusades then opened a flourishing trade between Europe and the outremer region, as Genoa, Venice, and Pisa established colonies and seized control of commerce with the Orient.

  In 1453 Ottoman power, based in Anatolia, extinguished the Byzantine Empire with the Conquest of Constantinople. The Ottoman captain Hayreddin Barbarossa became a symbol of that dominance, winning the Battle of Preveza in 1538. European powers struck back at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, damaging the Ottoman Navy. That was the last naval battle fought primarily between galleys. Along the western waters, the Barbary pirates of Northwest Africa preyed on Christian shipping; according to Robert Davis, from the 16th to 19th centuries they captured between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans as slaves.

• 5. Shifting Trade Routes

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  After the 1490s, a sea route to the Indian Ocean let Asian spices flow through the Atlantic ports of western Europe, drawing trade away from the Mediterranean for the first time in centuries. British mastery of Gibraltar then secured their influence across Africand Southwest Asia. After the naval battles of Abukir in 1799 and Trafalgar in 1805, the British held a long dominance over the sea.

  The opening of the lockless Suez Canal in 1869 changed everything again. The fastest route between Europe and Asia now ran through the Mediterranean toward East Africa and Asia. Ports like Trieste, with direct rail connections to Central and Eastern Europe, rose rapidly. The 163-kilometer canal needs no ship lock because the water level on either side is essentially the same.

  The two World Wars, the Suez Crisis, and the Cold War later pushed trade routes toward the northern ports of Europe. Naval warfare reached the sea in both the First World War and the Mediterranean theatre of the Second. The pendulum swung back toward the southern ports through European integration and the reactivation of the Silk Road.

• 6. A Sea That Vanished

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  Salt deposits more than three kilometers thick lie on parts of the Mediterranean floor, in places exceeding a million cubic kilometers in total. They are the residue of the Messinian salinity crisis, when the sea became landlocked and essentially dried up. The crisis was recently dated astronomically to a start at 5.96 million years ago, and it lasted some 630,000 years until about 5.3 million years ago. The cause lay to the west: as Africa converged on Iberia, it lifted the Betic-Rif mountain belts and gradually closed two marine gateways, the Betic and Rifian corridors. The closure of the Betic Corridor triggered the crisis.

  Then the water came back. Scientists estimate the sea was last filled about 5.3 million years ago in less than two years, through the Zanclean flood. Water poured from the Atlantic through a newly breached gateway, now the Strait of Gibraltar, at an estimated rate about one thousand times larger than the current flow of the Amazon River.

  The basin itself rests on oceanic crust. Once thought a remnant of the ancient Tethys Ocean, it is now understood as a younger structure, the Neotethys, formed by the convergence of the African Plate and the Eurasian Plate during the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic. In the 1920s Herman Sorgel proposed the Atlantropa project, a hydroelectric dam across the Strait of Gibraltar that would use the inflowing Atlantic current to generate power.

• 7. The Restless Seabed

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  The deepest recorded point in the Mediterranean is the Calypso Deep in the Ionian Sea, lying 62.6 kilometers southwest of Pylos, Greece, in the Hellenic Trench. The Malta Escarpment, a 250-kilometer undersea limestone cliff, runs south from Sicily's eastern coast toward the Maltese islands and divides the sea into western and eastern regions. More than 500 undersea canyons line the escarpment, reaching heights of 3.5 kilometers in places, and they were never carved by surface rivers.

  Volcanoes lurk beneath the surface. The Campi Flegrei del Mar di Sicilia, a field of submarine volcanoes about 40 kilometers southwest of Sicily, can temporarily emerge above the water during major eruptions, producing islands such as Ferdinandea, also known as Graham Island. In the Tyrrhenian Sea sits Marsili, about 175 kilometers south of Naples, one of the largest volcanoes in Europe at 70 kilometers long and 30 kilometers wide, larger than Mount Etna.

  The region is one of the most geologically active maritime areas on earth, straddling the boundary between the European and African plates. The Eastern Mediterranean, from Italy to Turkey, sees earthquakes whose magnitude can reach 7.5 Richter, with more than 350 recorded tsunamis. During the 20th century, 198,548 earthquake victims were recorded. The 1908 Messina earthquake and tsunami alone took more than 123,000 lives in Sicily and Calabria.

• 8. A Strained And Crowded Sea

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  More than 17,000 marine species are estimated to live in the Mediterranean, yet its waters are among the most oligotrophic, or nutrient-poor, in the world, often called a Low-Nutrient, Low-Chlorophyll area. Because the basin reflooded only five million years ago, most of its marine life is derived from the Atlantic Ocean. A resident population of orcas lived here until the 1980s, when they went extinct, probably from long-term PCB exposure. The Mediterranean monk seal, one of the world's most endangered marine mammals, still survives in the Aegean Sea in Greece.

  The Suez Canal has become the first pathway for alien species entering the sea. Over 70% of exotic decapods and about two-thirds of exotic fishes in the Mediterranean are of Indo-Pacific origin, arriving from the Red Sea. Pollution compounds the pressure. The United Nations Environment Programme has estimated that each year 650 million tonnes of sewage, 60,000 tonnes of mercury, and 36,000 tonnes of phosphates are dumped into the sea. More than 65% of fish stocks lie outside safe biological limits.

  In our own time the sea has acquired a darker name. In 2013 the Maltese president described it as a 'cemetery' for the migrants who drowned there, and European Parliament president Martin Schulz said in 2014 that migration policy had 'turned the Mediterranean into a graveyard'. After the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck, the Italian government launched Operation Mare Nostrum to rescue migrants and arrest traffickers. In 2015 more than one million migrants crossed the sea into Europe. Between 2013 and 2018, over 700,000 migrants landed in Italy. The same water that incubated civilizations now carries the weight of their conflicts.