Four side-by-side sections of Mediterranean coastlines |
The Mediterranean from Google Earth. Note the relatively shallow waters east of Italy, south of Sicily, around the Greek islands, and the basins of deeper waters. |
The crystal clear Aegean... is it TOO clear? |
1. How healthy IS the Mediterranean? Are there still places where one could go diving and see a rich, healthy, submarine Mediterranean ecosystem that's full of fish, invertebrates, corals, and other marine organisms? Where should I go to have this experience? (Note: Anything outside the Straits of Gibraltar, or the Bosporus Strait, or doesn't count.)
1. Work from Wikipedia outward. That is, start with the Wikipedia article and see where that leads. Look at the articles that are referred-to, and then look at articles that those articles refer to, following the reference chain outward.
2. Find a trans-national organization's report. What would such an organization be? Perhaps the UN, or maybe an international oceanographic research organization.
3. Search through Scholar for scholarly reports. Find a few and see if there's a consensus.
4. Search through a respected scientific journal that covers ecosystem science. This is analogous to searching through Google Scholar, but focuses just on one journal's output on the topic.
"...At present, habitat loss and degradation, followed by fishing impacts, pollution, climate change, eutrophication, and the establishment of alien species are the most important threats and affect the greatest number of taxonomic groups. All these impacts are expected to grow in importance in the future, especially climate change and habitat degradation. The spatial identification of hot spots highlighted the ecological importance of most of the western Mediterranean shelves ... western African coast, the Adriatic, and the Aegean Sea, which show high concentrations of endangered, threatened, or vulnerable species." (from the abstract)
"It is likely that some pressures and, more importantly, cumulative impacts on marine ecosystems generated by the increasing exploitation of the sea will grow at a faster rate than the solutions developed and implemented to mitigate them..."And that,
"Consequently, there is a high risk of failing to achieve Good Environmental Status in the Mediterranean Sea by 2020 for 7 out of 11 of the descriptors of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive..."This report also shows the area around Greece (including all of the islands) as the most intensely fished region in the entire Mediterranean--which might explain some of the paucity of fish I saw in Crete.
"They found that 64% of the unassessed [fish] stocks are below their sustainable numbers—comparable to the below-sustainability estimate of 63% for assessed stocks reported in Science in 2009. The findings indicate that unassessed stocks, such as cod and miscellaneous coast fish, are in decline—and are in particularly poor condition in developed areas like the Mediterranean Sea." [4]
"...scientists evaluated the status of more than 1200 species native to the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, the North Sea, and the European part of the Atlantic Ocean. Although conservation measures have been successful in improving stocks for some species.... The populations of more than 90 other species have plummeted low enough that they could go extinct, the report warns." [5]This is confirming what we found via our other methods.
“We found a huge gradient, an enormous contrast. In reserves off Spain and Italy, we found the largest fish biomass in the Mediterranean,” said National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Enric Sala, the paper’s lead author. “Unfortunately, around Turkey and Greece, the waters were bare.” [6]but ending up with a hopeful observation, usually like this:
"Fish abound in Spain’s Medes Islands Marine Reserve in the Mediterranean Sea. Unprecedented new research turned up healthy ecosystems in well-enforced marine reserves across the Mediterranean..."So I conclude that my search for disconfirmation has failed, and that the evidence is pretty strong that the Mediterranean is a deeply compromised sea with significant challenges.