Environment pollution; the Mar Menor: Action at last to save a dying sea

The largest permanent saltwater lagoon in Europe is very sick, says 71-year-old campaigner Isabel Rubio, and what is so sad is that the devastation has been caused by human greed.

For the people living and working near the Mar Menor, “it is as if we have suddenly found ourselves living next to a garbage dump,” she says, fighting back tears. The devastation of the lagoon is one of the greatest ecological collapses in Europe, in what was once one of the most beautiful areas of Spain.

Rubio has lost hope that the protected body of water that juts out into the Mediterranean in the south-east of Spain will be restored in her lifetime, but says she will fight “to her last breath” in the hope that one day it may be healed.

As a child, Rubio would spend her summers swimming in the crystal-clear waters of lagoon, once home to vulnerable species such as seahorses and European eels, but now when the weather gets warmer, the 135km2 body of water becomes a green soup, and death casts its grim shadow.

In 2016, 85 per cent of the seabed vegetation died as a result of extreme eutrophication, where an excess of nutrients boosts growth of algae and plants, removing oxygen from the water and blocking light. In 2019 thousands of dead fish and crustaceans were washed up on shore and the gruesome images were beamed across the world. The grim spectacle repeated itself again in 2021.

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DCAT-AP/NTI-RISP

Basic information
Resource type Text
Date of creation 2024-09-17
Date of last revision 2024-09-17
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Metadata identifier 1bf04736-8c88-5b47-a422-50438a32543a
Metadata language Spanish
Themes (NTI-RISP)
High-value dataset category
ISO 19115 topic category biota
Other identifier DOI 10.1049/et.2022.0302
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Character encoding UTF-8
Spatial information
INSPIRE identifier ESPMITECOIEPNBMMENOR659
INSPIRE Themes
Geographic identifier Murcia
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Spatial representation Type
Bounding Box
"{\"type\": \"Polygon\", \"coordinates\": [[[-2.34, 37.38], [-0.69, 37.38], [-0.69, 38.76], [-2.34, 38.76], [-2.34, 37.38]]]}"
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  1. Engineering & Technology
  2. Vol 17
  3. no 3
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Name of the dataset creator McGlone, C.
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