Levantine Sea

Coordinates: 34°N 34°E / 34°N 34°E / 34; 34 (Levantine Sea)
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Levantine Sea
drainage basins
for inflow rivers
Surface area320,000 km2 (120,000 sq mi)
Extent of the Levantine Sea

The Levantine Sea (

Arabic: البحر الشامي, romanizedal-Baḥr as-Shāmī; Turkish: Levanten Denizi, or Turkish: Levant Denizi; Greek: Θάλασσα του Λεβάντε, romanizedThálassa tou Levánte; Hebrew: הים הלבנטיני, romanizedha-Yam ha-Levantíni) is the easternmost part of the Mediterranean Sea.[1][2]

Geography

The Levantine Sea is bordered by Turkey in the north and north-east corner, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine in the east, Egypt in the south, and the Aegean Sea in the northwest. Where it is used as a term its western border is amorphous, hence Mediterranean is more commonly used. The open western border to the next part of the Mediterranean (the Libyan Sea) is defined as a line from headland Ras al-Helal in Libya to Gavdos, south of the western half of Crete.

The largest island in its subset of water is Cyprus. The greatest depth of 4,384 m (14,383 ft) is found in the Pliny Trench, about 80 km (50 mi) south of Crete. The Levantine Sea covers 320,000 km2 (120,000 sq mi).

The northern part of the Levantine Sea between Cyprus and Turkey can be further specified as the

Gulf of İskenderun (to the northeast) and the Gulf of Antalya
(to the northwest).

Basins

Boundaries of the Levant Basin, or Levantine Basin (US EIA)

The Leviathan gas field is quite central in the south-eastern corner, the Levantine Basin.[3][4]

To the west of the Levantine Deep Marine Basin is the Nile Delta Basin, followed by the Herodotus Basin, 130,000 km2 (50,000 sq mi) large and up to 3,200 m (10,500 ft) deep,[5] which – at a possible age of 340 million years – is believed to be the oldest known ocean crust worldwide.[6]

Ecology

The

hypersaline natural lakes, interacting with the canal – were a bar to migration of Red Sea species northward for many decades, but as their salinity has virtually equalized with that of the Red Sea, the barrier to migration was removed, and plants and animals from the Red Sea have begun to colonize the eastern Mediterranean. This is the Lessepsian migration, after Ferdinand de Lesseps, the chief engineer
of the canal.

Most of the river discharge is from the

-poorer than before. This has decimated the morning sardine
litorine haul in nets but favored many Red Sea species.

See also

References

Further reading

  • Kubin, Elisabeth; Poulain, Pierre-Marie; Mauri, Elena; Menna, Milena; Notarstefano, Giulio. 2019. "Levantine Intermediate and Levantine Deep Water Formation: An Argo Float Study from 2001 to 2017" Water 11, no. 9: 1781. https://doi.org/10.3390/w11091781
  • Özsoy, E. and H. Güngör (1993). The Northern Levantine Sea Circulation Based on Combined Analysis of CTD and ADCP Data, In: P. Brasseur (editor), Data Assimilation: Tools for Modelling the Ocean in a Global Change Perspective, NATO ASI Series, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
  • Sur, H. İ., Özsoy, E., and Ü. Ünlüata, (1992). Simultaneous Deep and Intermediate Depth Convection in the Northern Levantine Sea, Winter 1992, Ocean.

External links