지중해의 해양생태학적 고찰

Abstract

The Mediterranean Sea covers an area of approximately 2.5 million square kilometers and a volume of 3.7 million cubic kilometers, excluding the Black Sea, and has an average depth of about 1500m. As a sea it is rather unique in that it is almost completely surrounded by land: Europe to the north, Africa to the south, and Asia Minor to the east. The Mediterranean is a silled basin, separated from the Atlantic Ocean by a shallow sill of 320m depth at the Straits of Gibraltar. The Siculo-Tunisian sill close to which lie the Maltese Islands divides the Mediterranean into an East and a West Basin. The Mediterranean Sea has three principal kinds of water: the Mediterranean Surface Water (0-200m deep), the Mediterranean Inetrmediate Water (200-600m deep) and the Mediterranean Deep Water (deeper than 600m). The Mediterranean generally has tides of very low amplitude (0.06m in the Maltses Islands). General water mass properties, ecosystem diversity, species diversity, origins and affinities of marine flora and fauna, and species distribution patterns, biogeographic classification in the Mediterranean Sea are reviewed in this text.