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Mediterranean Sea
The cradle sea of Western civilization, locked between three continents
Nearly closed off from the world ocean by the eight-mile bottleneck of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean is the great inland sea of the Western imagination. Its name means simply the sea in the middle of the land, and for the empires that ringed it the description was literal: Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Ottoman power all radiated from its shores. Bluer and warmer than the Atlantic it barely touches, ringed by olive groves and limestone cliffs, it is the most storied body of water on Earth.
Covering roughly 2.5 million square kilometres, the Mediterranean is an evaporative basin: the sun draws off far more water than its rivers supply, so a constant Atlantic current pours in through the Strait of Gibraltar to keep it filled. This loss leaves the sea saltier and warmer than the open ocean, and starves it of nutrients, giving it that famous clarity. A submarine sill divides it into western and eastern basins, the deeper eastern half plunging to the Calypso Deep at about 5,267 metres off the Greek coast. Five million years ago the sea dried out almost entirely before refilling in a catastrophic flood.
No sea has carried more of human history. Egyptian grain, Lebanese cedar, Roman legions, and Venetian merchant galleys all moved across its surface, and the religions and alphabets of three continents met along its coasts. Today it is the world's busiest cruising ground and a corridor for shipping bound for the Suez Canal, even as overfishing, plastic pollution, and warming threaten its singular ecosystems. Twenty-one nations share its shores, and its waters remain the front line of migration and geopolitics between Europe and Africa.