Joint sea studies of the IAEA and European Union mediterranean partner ship

Several oceanographic and geographic features of the Mediterranean Sea render it particularly vulnerable to the potential effects of anthropogenic pollutants. The sea is a relatively shallow, semi-enclosed body of water with only limited water exchange taking place at Straits of Gibraltar and through the Bosphorus. Less saline Atlantic surface water enters at Gibraltar and slowly circulates counter clockwise around the Mediterranean basin. There it gradually becomes warmer and more saline due to insolation and intense evaporation. The weak coastal current systems and general lack of tides combine to reduce dispersion of pollutants entering its coastal water. Furthermore, recent construction of dams on some major rivers have substantially reduced spring runoff which tends to cleanse the shelf region of deposited contaminants. Given the Sea's special geographical setting and potential sensitivity to human activity, it is not surprising that over the last decade much effort has been put into studying its biogeochemical structure and functioning. Furthermore, the Sea's restricted size affords marine scientists the opportunity to study, on a reduced scale, processes typical of the world's oceans. Recent trends in oceanography have shown that the degree of our understanding these processes significantly improves when the questions to be answered are addressed in a multidisciplinary way. Recognizing this fact, the European Union (EU) has mounted various large-scale multidisciplinary marine programmes, several of which have focused on the Mediterranean Sea. Because of its long history of collaborative work in the Mediterranean, the IAEA's Marine Environmental Laboratory (MEL) in Monaco has been invited by several EU partner institutes to contribute to these programmes, usually in the area of employing nuclear techniques to study key oceanic processes. These EU-supported programmed have been instrumental in broadening MEL's extrabugetary funding base, which is often necessary to fulfil approved IAEA regular programmes dealing with marine environmental questions. In this respect, MEL has been very active in the 1990s studying oceanic processes in the Mediterranean Sea that are crucial to understanding the transport and fate of radionuclides and other contaminants. This article highlights the main activities MEL has undertaken