A quick look at the Eastern Mediterranean Sea

First a large view of the bathymetry covering (almost) the entire Mediterranean Sea. The deeper parts are found around (18E, 36N) with a large area deeper than 4000 m.

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A zoom on the Eastern-most part of the basin where flight MS804 might have crashed. The search area (as of now, May 20th) is around (29E, 34N). This part of the basin is “swallower” than the basin just to the West. Still, the sea floor is around 3000 m deep. Note a very deep trough near (29E, 36N) that extends below 4000 m. The search area seems to be further south, on the Southern flank of the ridge.

 

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These two plots show profiles of the bathymetry (from Egypt/left to Turkey/right) along 28E and 29E, cutting through the search area around 34N.

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A snapshot of the surface currents on April 18th, 2016. More precisely, this shows the magnitude of the absolute zonal (East-West direction) geostrophic flow. These currents are obtained from satellite measurements (measurement of the “bumps” in the sea surface, the bumps are just of a few inches high, from AVISO). The se currents do not include the wind-driven currents (Ekman flow).

In the Eastern Mediterranean, currents reach ~10-20 cm/s (half or a quarter of a mile per hour). The currents looks very messy, they change direction every 100 km or so. This reflects mesoscale eddies and fronts (the oceanic turbulence that is big enough to be influenced by Earth rotation). These eddies, or vortices, are almost circular, 50 to 150 km wide.

 

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