Mediterranean Sea

Mediterranean Sea
Area
• Total	2,500,000 km²

The Mediterranean Sea is a vast intercontinental body of water situated at the junction of three continents. Europe to the north, Asia to the east, and Africa to the south. It constitutes the world's largest enclosed sea, spanning approximately 4,000 kilometers from east to west and reaching 1,800 kilometers at its widest point from north to south, with a total surface area of 2.51 million square kilometers. Its coastline extends roughly 22,530 kilometers. It serves as the primary passage through which European and North American powers access petroleum supplies from West Asia and North Africa.

The sea connects to the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar in the west, to the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal in the southeast, and to the Black Sea through a chain of waterways in the northeast comprising the Dardanelles Strait, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosphorus Strait. It is one of the world's most strategically contested waterways, an artery of global commerce, an energy transit corridor, and area for imperialist rivalry as recently the eastern Mediterranean has become the target for inter-imperialist conflict between both NATO members Greece and Turkiye.

Geography

The Mediterranean is split into peninsulas, islands, and submarine ridges into multiple smaller seas and basins. A submarine ridge running from the Apennine Peninsula through Sicily to Tunisia, with a sill depth of 366 meters, forms the main division between the eastern and western halves of the sea.

The western Mediterranean spans three basins separated by submarine ridges and island chains. These are the Alboran Basin, the Algerian Basin also known as the Balearic Sea and the Tyrrhenian Basin, surrounded by the Italian Peninsula, Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.

The eastern Mediterranean spans the Ionian Basin, south of the Adriatic Sea and between Italy and Greece, and the Levant Basin, in the far eastern part of the sea. The Aegean Sea occupies the northwestern corner of the Levant Basin, spanning the islands of the Greek archipelago.

The average depth of the Mediterranean is approximately 1,500 meters. Its deepest point reaches 5,121 meters, in the Ionian Basin south of Greece.

Imperialism

The Mediterranean Sea has been the centre of imperialist exploitation spanning the slave-based empires in antiquity to the industrial and finance capitalism of recent, because of its connection to the Atlantic and Indian Oceans through the Strait of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal has made it integral to the circulation of commodities and accelerating the integration of colonial markets into the world capitalist system. Its major ports of Gibraltar, Barcelona, Marseille, Genoa, Napoli, Rijeka, Valletta, Izmir, Beirut, Alexandria, Tripoli, and Algiers have historically extracted wealth from colonized and semi-colonial territories. Marseille, for instance, grew rich as the gateway of French colonial plunder in North Africa and the Levant.

It is heavily militarized with The United States Sixth Fleet, based in Naples projecting power across the sea. NATO maintains a network of naval and air bases along the European and African shores such as Rota, Spain to Souda Bay, Crete and Incirlik, Turkiye. The 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the 2011 destruction of Libya, and the proxy war in Syria were all staged using Mediterranean naval assets and bases. As a result of these imperialist wars, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia have attempted the crossing to Europe with an estimation that over 20,000 have died in the attempt since 2014.

As a response to the consequences of their imperialist wars, which have devastated entire societies they fund the Libyan coast guard to intercept boats, and establish detention camps where refugees have been documented to being subjected to enslavement, rape, and murder though at the same time, they want to absorb some of these refugees to bolster their declining working class though regulate the flow of labor power through these inhumane detention camps. While forcing the eligible refugees into the destination country's underground economy as a highly exploitable, low-wage workforce lacking legal protections to benefit certain industries.

The Mediterranean has recently gained increased significance with the discovery of offshore natural gas fields in its eastern basin. A proposed EastMed pipeline intended to transport Zionist and Cypriot gas to Europe through Greece and Italy pitting a French-Greek-Israeli-Egyptian union against Turkish interests. This conflict is born from the borders imposed by the imperial core during the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that carved up the Ottoman Empire alongside the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne which has left unresolved land and maritime disputes.