River

Ebro Rhone Po

Nile

Drainage region

Southern flanks of the Pyrenees and northern flanks of the Iberian Cordillera Central Alps and flows through Lake Geneva and southeastern France Southern flanks of the Alps and the northern part of the Apennine mountain range Northeastern part of the African craton

The Eastern Basin is connected to the Western Basin through the Strait of Sicily, with a maximum depth of about 400 m, and to the Black Sea by the Straits of the Dardanelles, with a maximum width of only 7 km and an average depth of 55 m. The inflow from the Black Sea is two orders of magnitude smaller than that from the Atlantic reaching ca. 200–300 km3

per year. The connec-

tion on the southeastern end with the Red Sea occurs through the man-made Suez Canal. The continental shelves in the East- ern Basin are narrow off Peloponnesus, Crete, and southern and northern Turkey. However, they are particularly well developed east of Libya, in the area influenced by deposits from the Nile Riv- er delta, and in the Adriatic, where large areas are shallower than 100 m due to Po delta deposits. The Aegean Sea is also fairly shal- low, a consequence of its relatively young crust rather than high sediment input. In the Eastern Basin, bathyal plains are deeper and smaller than those in the west. Maximum depths are up to 4.200 m in the Ionian Abyssal Plain and 3.200 m in the Herodotus Abyssal Plain (Amblas et al. 2004).

The Mediterranean drainage basin extends over an area of more than 5 million km2

. This includes the Nile and the Libyan coastal zone, neither of which are active parts of the drainage

Outflow sub-basin

Catalano-Balearic Sea Gulf of Lion Adriatic Sea Levantine Sea

Drainage area

84.000 km2 96.000 km2 75.000 km2 3.300.000 km2

basin. Most of the water that drains to the Nile evaporates, par- ticularly following construction of the Aswan High Dam, which increased the amount of water drawn from the system for ag- riculture. The drainage basin of the southern Eastern Mediter- ranean (including much of the Libyan coastal zone) is mostly desert with only small seasonal watercourses. Excluding these areas that have little riverine input, the drainage basin of the Mediterranean Sea measures less than 1,5 million km2

(Ludwig

et al. 2009). The major perennial rivers (Ebro, Rhone, Po, and Nile) are supplied by very large drainage basins that, in most cases, collect water beyond the boundaries of the Mediterra- nean climatic belt.

Smaller rivers, with drainage basins less than 10.000 km2 , cover

nearly 60 % of the Mediterranean catchment area and play an important role. However, they are either ephemeral or carry small volumes of water due to relatively low annual rainfall (be- low 500 mm), high evaporation and infiltration, and the seasonal and sporadic nature of rainfall.

Sedimentary systems associated with the larger rivers have created large coastal plains, defining the characteristics of the

20

STATE OF THE MEDITERRANEAN MARINE AND COASTAL ENVIRONMENT