Global warming will make Mediterranean less 'salty'

Judy Siegel-Itzovich -

Italian expert warns of consequences for the sea; Jerusalem workshop marks decade-long marine life census.

The Mediterranean Sea will not become more salty due to the growth of desalination plants that leave salt residue behind, according to an Italian expert who participated in a decade-long census of world marine life. Instead, said Prof. Roberto Danovaro of the Polytechnic University of Marché, the melting of Arctic glaciers due to global warming will make the Mediterranean and oceans less saline.

The head of the department of marine science at the Italian university was speaking in Jerusalem on Monday at a workshop held at the Israel Academy of Science and the Humanities to mark the end of the census, in which 2,700 scientists from 80 countries, including Israel, participated.

A total of $650 million was spent by US, European and other sources for the first-ever project, which documented the presence of some 250,000 species at various depths, from microscopic creatures to whales. Nevertheless, scientists believe that 750,000 more marine species remain to be discovered.

Danovaro, on his first visit to Israel, said at the workshop that the Israeli scientists had been very valuable to the project. Besides discovering some 1,200 new marine species through sampling and observation, the multinational team discovered that marine life was richer than previously believed, as well as more interconnected and more altered due to environmental influences.

There were also large areas still unexplored, he told an audience of 80 scientists, including immunologist and academy president Prof. Ruth Arnon, and university students in the field.

“We now have a benchmark for development and will be able to see changes in marine creatures as the years pass, and, it is hoped, repair damage that man has caused them,” he said.

Some 40 experts at 25 institutions in countries that lie along the Mediterranean Sea participated in the effort to estimate and study its biodiversity.

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