Take stock of the geographical straits of Europe
Strait of Gibraltar: Located between the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula in Europe and the northwest corner of Africa, the strait connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It is 14–43 km wide. The narrowest point is between Cape Maroqui in Spain and Cape Sires in Morocco, only 13 km. It is about 58 km long from east to west. The water depth averages 375 meters, with the shallowest being 301 meters. Early navigators used it as the only sea route between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, which had great strategic and economic value and is still an important shipping route to southern Europe, North Africa and Western Asia. The northern shore is Spain and the southern shore is Morocco. From 1704 onwards, the British occupied Gibraltar in the northeast of the Strait and built military fortresses to control the traffic of the Strait. The wind direction of the strait is mostly east wind and west wind, and the shallow cold air mass entering the western Mediterranean sea from the north often becomes a low-level high-speed east wind, which is locally known as "Levant wind". The surface current flowing eastward through this strait from the Atlantic Ocean at a speed of about 103 cm/s flows eastward into the Mediterranean Sea, which is about 122 metres deeper than the heavier, colder and saltier currents flowing westward from the Mediterranean, and has played a decisive role in preventing the Mediterranean from becoming a shrinking salt lake.
