Marine pollution from shipwrecks at the sea bottom: A case study from the Mediterranean basin

In order to properly adopt the international recommendations on the marine environment and biodiversity conservation, as well as fishing resources and human health, an increasing effort is incoming in the last two decades to study, prevent and mitigate the anthropogenic environmental impact in the Mediterranean sea. The main research efforts and policy strategies implemented in the last two decades are regarding oil pollution (dumping, spills, shipping, extraction, accidents, etc.), civil and industrial waste discharges and, recently, littering. Less known are the other pollution sources generally not visible and frequently distributed offshore. One of this cryptic sources of pollution is represented by military and commercial shipwrecks abandoned on the sea bottom. Actually, fuels, construction materials, army and transported goods deposited at the bottom of the sea can generate ecological damage thus modifying natural biological diversity and fishing activity with unpredictable hazards and dangerous effects on the marine ecosystem. In particular, indiscriminate and uncontrolled leakage of toxic material and organic/inorganic pollutants from those vessels could affect the wellbeing of the deep sea also for long-time. Very few data are available on the effects of pollution produced by shipwrecks in the Mediterranean sea although thousand of military ships were abandoned at the seabed of the basin as effect of accidents during the first and the second word wars. This contribution aims to explore the potential effects of contamination of a number of shipwrecks identified by multi-proxy geophysical tools at the bottom of one of the key areas of the Mediterranean sea, around the Sicily island, where intense ship traffic and fishing activities occur. Geophysical exploration and geochemical data (heavy metals, PAHs, PCBs, Pesticides, hydrocarbons, etc.) are here presented for selected cases and testify the high risk represented by this kind of point-source pollution on the marine system. © 2013 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.