60 Fun Facts About Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean Sea lies between which three continents?

It is almost completely enclosed by land, with the Levant to the east, Anatolia and Southern Europe to the north and North Africa to the south.

How wide is the Strait of Gibraltar at its narrowest, where it separates Spain from Morocco?

The strait is the sea's only natural link to the Atlantic, and the ancients called its flanking rocks the Pillars of Hercules.

The Mediterranean connects to the Black Sea through which strait?

The Dardanelles lead into the Sea of Marmara first; the Bosporus then cuts through Istanbul into the Black Sea.

Roughly what share of the global ocean surface does the Mediterranean cover?

That is about 2.5 million square kilometres, split among fifteen marginal seas.

What does 'Mediterranean' literally mean in Latin?

The word combines medius (middle) and terra (land), a calque of the Greek mesogeios.

What Latin name did the Romans give the sea once the Empire controlled all its shores?

It means 'Our Sea'; earlier Romans had called it Mare Magnum (Great Sea) or Mare Internum (Internal Sea).

In Turkish the Mediterranean is Akdeniz, meaning what?

In Turkic tradition white stood for the west, black for the north, which also explains the Black Sea's name.

The Old English name for the Mediterranean, Wendel-sæ, referred to which people?

The Vandals had occupied the North African coast during the Migration Period.

Which state is the only one ever to have controlled the entire Mediterranean coastline?

For about 400 years after Augustus the sea earned the nickname 'Roman Lake'.

Which two civilisations were the earliest advanced societies trading across the Mediterranean?

The Bronze Age Collapse around 1200 BC wrecked many of the eastern Mediterranean's cities and trade routes.

Which Persian king built a canal linking the Red Sea to the Nile, and so to the Mediterranean?

It was wide enough for two triremes to pass with oars extended and took four days to traverse.

What are the two largest Mediterranean islands, by both area and population?

The sea has around 10,000 islands and islets, of which only about 250 are permanently inhabited.

What is the longest river that empties into the Mediterranean?

Its basin makes up about two-thirds of the sea's drainage area, though the Rhône and Po discharge similar volumes because Europe is so much wetter.

Which two island countries lie within the Mediterranean?

The UK also has coastline via Gibraltar and the Cyprus bases of Akrotiri and Dhekelia.

Where is the deepest recorded point in the Mediterranean, the Calypso Deep?

It lies in the Hellenic Trench about 63 km south-west of Pylos, Greece, at more than 5,100 metres.

Roughly how long is the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to the Gulf of Alexandretta?

The coastline runs about 46,000 km in total.

About 5.9 million years ago the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic and dried out. What is this event called?

Salt deposits from it are more than a million cubic kilometres in volume and in places over 3 km thick.

The Zanclean flood that last refilled the Mediterranean is estimated to have taken roughly how long?

Water poured through the newly breached Gibraltar gateway at about a thousand times the flow of the Amazon.

Without the inflow of Atlantic water, the Mediterranean's level would fall by roughly how much each year?

Evaporation greatly exceeds rain and river runoff, especially in the east, which is why salinity rises eastward.

Saltier Mediterranean water sinking below incoming Atlantic water creates what kind of exchange through Gibraltar?

In the 1920s Herman Sörgel proposed damming the strait to harvest hydroelectric power in his Atlantropa scheme.

The residence time of water in the Mediterranean is roughly how long?

That short turnover makes the sea a sensitive recorder of climate change.

Which cold winter winds trigger deep-water formation in the Mediterranean?

Deep water forms mainly in the Adriatic, the Aegean and the Gulf of Lion.

Because it is so low in nutrients and chlorophyll, the Mediterranean is described as which kind of area?

It effectively meets the definition of a marine desert, with the eastern basin called 'ultraoligotrophic'.

A shallow ridge between Sicily and which country divides the Mediterranean into two basins?

The Western Mediterranean covers about 850,000 square kilometres, the Eastern about 1.65 million.

Marsili, one of the largest volcanoes in Europe, lies under which sea about 175 km south of Naples?

At 70 km long and 30 km wide it is larger than Etna and belongs to the Aeolian volcanic arc.

Which body of water lies between Corsica and the Italian region of Liguria?

The Alboran Sea sits between Spain and Morocco, and the Balearic Sea between mainland Spain and its islands.

The Malta Escarpment, an undersea cliff south of Sicily, is home to more than how many submarine canyons?

The 250 km escarpment's cliffs reach 3.5 km high in places, and the canyons were not carved by rivers.

The 1571 Battle of Lepanto was the last great naval battle fought mainly between which type of vessel?

The Holy League, organised by Pope Pius V, nearly wiped out the Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Patras.

Which Ottoman admiral won the Battle of Preveza in 1538?

The Ottomans had already extinguished the Byzantine Empire by taking Constantinople in 1453.

Per Robert Davis, Barbary pirates enslaved about a million Europeans across which centuries?

The corsairs of north-west Africa preyed on Christian shipping and coastal towns across the western Mediterranean.

The Battle of the Nile in 1798 was fought in which bay?

Nelson destroyed the French fleet that had escorted Napoleon's army to Egypt.

The Suez Canal has no ship locks for what reason?

The 163 km canal opened in 1869 and let Red Sea species pour into the Mediterranean.

Species that invade the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal are known by what name?

The name honours canal builder Ferdinand de Lesseps; over 70% of exotic decapods in the sea are Indo-Pacific in origin.

Which of these Mediterranean crops was introduced to Spain and Sicily during Arab rule?

The Arabs also brought sugarcane, rice, cotton, lemons, apricots, spinach, eggplants and saffron.

The Spanish words aceite and aceituna come from the Arabic al-zait, meaning what?

The Arabs kept up olive oil production and pomegranate cultivation from Greco-Roman times.

Which volcanic eruption around 1600 BC is among the largest in the Mediterranean's recorded past?

It buried the Minoan town of Akrotiri on what is now Santorini; Vesuvius followed with Pompeii in AD 79.

The 1908 earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 123,000 people destroyed which two cities?

It ranks among the deadliest natural disasters in modern Europe.

Which volcano on Sicily is the tallest active volcano in Europe?

It stands about 3,403 metres high on the largest and most populous island in the sea.

The Mediterranean's average salinity of 38 PSU is high because of what?

The effect is strongest in the eastern half, where the water level drops and salinity climbs.

A resident population of which marine mammal went extinct in the Mediterranean in the 1980s, probably from PCBs?

Vagrant individuals are still sighted every year.

The endangered Mediterranean monk seal still breeds in which Greek sea?

Between 800 and 1,000 survive across the Mediterranean, Madeira and the Cabo Blanco coast of West Africa.

Roughly what share of the world's oil is shipped across the Mediterranean each year?

Some 250 to 300 tankers cross the sea daily, and there are around 10 accidental spills a year.

The Port of Trieste is the start of a pipeline that supplies what share of Germany's oil demand?

The Transalpine Pipeline also covers 90% of Austria's needs and half of the Czech Republic's.

How many migrants crossed the Mediterranean into Europe in 2015?

Italy launched Operation Mare Nostrum after the 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck to rescue migrants and arrest traffickers.

How many marine species are estimated to live in the Mediterranean?

Because the sea dried out in the Messinian crisis, its marine life descends mostly from Atlantic species that arrived after the refilling.

Which international agreement aims to reduce pollution in the Mediterranean?

The UN estimates 650 million tonnes of sewage and 60,000 tonnes of mercury enter the sea every year.

By what name from antiquity were the mountains flanking the Strait of Gibraltar known?

The Latin name for the strait, Fretum Herculeum, comes from the same legend; Gibraltar itself is one of the 'pillars'.

Besides the Greek city-states, which classical people colonised the Mediterranean coasts?

Rome's later victory over Phoenician-founded Carthage in the Punic Wars made it master of the western basin.

In which year did the Suez Canal open, redirecting Europe-Asia trade through the Mediterranean?

Ports like Trieste, with direct rail links to Central Europe, suddenly found themselves on the fastest route to Asia.

The Rock of Gibraltar's name comes from an Arabic phrase honouring a commander; what does it mean?

It honours the commander Tariq ibn Ziyad; naval crews shorten the strait's name to STROG.

Which Spanish autonomous city sits on the African side of the Strait of Gibraltar?

Ferries link it to Spain, and Spain and Morocco have discussed an undersea rail tunnel across the strait since the 1980s.

The Rock of Gibraltar may have been a last outpost of which people, as late as 24,000 years ago?

Evidence of their habitation around the strait goes back some 125,000 years.

Roughly what area does the Mediterranean Sea cover?

That is about 0.7% of the global ocean surface, spread across fifteen marginal seas.

Which marginal sea of the Mediterranean lies between Spain and Morocco at its far western end?

East of it the Balearic Sea separates mainland Spain from its islands, and the Ligurian Sea lies between Corsica and Liguria.

Under which treaty was Gibraltar ceded in perpetuity to Britain?

Britain has used the enclave ever since as a surety for control of the sea lanes in and out of the Mediterranean.

What is the average depth of the Mediterranean Sea?

The deepest recorded point, the Calypso Deep, plunges to about 5,109 metres.

How many marginal seas, such as the Aegean and Adriatic, does the Mediterranean include?

Several smaller named seas, like the Thracian, Icarian and Myrtoan, are themselves parts of the Aegean.

How many U-boats did Germany slip into the Mediterranean between September 1941 and May 1944?

They rode the currents through the British-controlled strait with engines off to avoid detection.

What was the 1920s-30s scheme to dam the Strait of Gibraltar and lower the Mediterranean called?

It promised electricity and vast new land for settlement, at the cost of devastating the region's climate and ecology.

Who became the first known person to swim across the Strait of Gibraltar, in April 1928?

It was her sixth attempt since December 1927 and took 12 hours 50 minutes.