Dust Storm Over the Eastern Mediterranean Sea
Dust Storm Over the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. A large plume of Saharan Desert dust (tan pixels) was blowing over Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean on May 10, 2003. This true-color image was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), flying aboard NASA´s Aqua satellite.
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa and on the east by the Levant. Although the sea is sometimes considered a part of the Atlantic Ocean, it is usually referred to as a separate body of water. Geological evidence indicates that around 5.9 million years ago, the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic and was partly or completely desiccated over a period of some 600,000 years (the Messinian salinity crisis) before being refilled by the Zanclean flood about 5.3 million years ago.
It covers an area of about 2.5 million square kilometres (0.97×106 sq mi), representing 0.7% of the global ocean surface, but its connection to the Atlantic via the Strait of Gibraltar—the narrow strait that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea and separates Spain in Europe from Morocco in Africa—is only 14 km (9 mi) wide. In oceanography, it is sometimes called the Eurafrican Mediterranean Sea or the European Mediterranean Sea to distinguish it from mediterranean seas elsewhere.
