The Mediterranean Sea contains just 1 percent of the Earth’s ocean water but 8 percent of the world’s biodiversity.
Twenty-eight percent of Mediterranean species are found nowhere else on Earth. Notable residents include eight species of whales, dolphins and porpoises; loggerhead and green turtles; monk seals; and more than 80 species of sharks and rays.
Twenty-two nations (belonging to three different continents) occupy the Mediterranean’s perimeter and up to a third of the world’s shipping traffic traverses its waters. Besides ship traffic, human pressure also comes from the large and growing number of tourists entering the coasts each summer.
The Mediterranean Sea has an average depth of 1,500 m (4,900 ft), and the deepest recorded point is 5,109 m (16,762 ft) in the Calypso Deep in the Ionian Sea. The continental margins of the Mediterranean include shallow continental shelves that can extend hundreds of km (like the Adriatic or the Gulf of Lion) to just few km (like Corsica and Calabria) and steep continental slopes dissected by submarine canyons and a large variety of slides and gravity-driven flows. In addition, thermohaline bottom current can impinge the seafloor, leading to large migrating bedforms or erosional scours.
50 m
This is a rich wildlife layer occupied by bottlenose dolphins, harbor porpoises, monk seals, sardines, swordfish, and eight different species of whales.
100 m
Loggerhead sea turtles can dive to depths of up to 950 feet (290 m). Humans scuba diving at this depth typically become incapacitated.
150 m
Water pressure is 222 pounds per square inch, or 15 times greater than the weight of the Earth’s atmosphere at sea level.
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The Mediterranean is a “concentration” basin where Evaporation exceeds the sum of Precipitation and Runoff (from land catchments). Evaporation, stronger close to the isles of Creta and Cyprus, leads to the formation of the Levantine Intermediate Water a high-salinity water mass that flows westward between 200m and 600m (656ft and 1,969ft) water depth interacting with the seafloor of continental slopes.
700 m
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900 m
1000 m
This is the maximum depth where living deep white coral colonies occur in the Mediterranean. The corals do not construct reef but colonize hard- or firm-ground seafloor areas in association with sponges to create hot spots of benthic biodiversity.
1100 m
1200 m
Water temperatures at this level in the Mediterranean can exceed 57 degrees Fahrenheit (14 degrees Celsius), significantly warmer than the 39 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) that is typical at this ocean depth, leading to uniquely adapted ecosystems.
1300 m
Four deep-water shark species have been found at depths of 1300 to 1400 meters in the Mediterranean.
1400 m
The deep-sea floor can be flat and muddy or display a variety of sedimentary architectures including deep-sea channels, submarine slides, and large bedforms shaped by bottom currents.
Water pressure here carries a crushing force of 2,200 pounds - more than one ton and nearly 1,000 kilograms - per square inch.
1500 m
1600 m
Wind forcing during winter outbreaks from the north leads to heat loss and dense water formation on the northern Mediterranean shelves (Gulf of Lion, Adriatic, Aegean). Once formed, this water mass descends along the basin slopes driven by gravity, exceeding speeds of 1 m/sec, sculpting the seafloor and bringing oxygen and nutrients to the deepest reaches of the basin.
1700 m
Geotechnical gear operating at these depths has to be specially designed to withstand compression at high pressure. Seas' remotely operated deep-sea drill is designed for use at these depths and takes small borehole soil samples our scientists can then analyze to understand the physical properties of the soil and rock at and below the subsurface.
