Pub question. Which is bigger, the Mediterranean or France? (If you came here from the Texas argument, yes, Texas beats France too. France is having a week.)
Take your time. The Med feels knowable. It’s the holiday sea. Twenty-one countries crowd round it like it’s a table at a wedding. You can swim in it before breakfast and fly across it in an hour. France, meanwhile, is the big one, the largest country in the EU, the hexagon that swallows a whole corner of every map of Europe.
Mediterranean: 1,565,611 km². France: 635,073 km².
The sea takes it by two and a half Frances. It wasn’t a contest.
The sea with a criminal record
Since you’re here, some history the brochure leaves out. Around six million years ago the Strait of Gibraltar closed and the Mediterranean more or less dried up. For hundreds of thousands of years Europe’s favourite sea was a salt desert a couple of kilometres below sea level. Geologists call it the Messinian salinity crisis.
Then, about 5.3 million years ago, the Atlantic broke back through. The refill, known as the Zanclean flood, may have taken as little as a couple of years, with water thundering through the gap at rates no river on Earth comes close to. The strait it carved is 13 km wide at its narrowest today. Average depth of the modern sea: about 1,500 metres. Its deepest point, Calypso Deep off Greece, drops past 5,200.
That’s the puddle you were about to rank below France.
Run the tape
Open Mediterranean vs France. The app lets you put sea shapes and countries on the same map, so drag France out into the middle of the water. It floats there like an island with sea room on every side. Drag the Med over Western Europe instead and it blankets France, then reaches out for Spain and Italy while it’s at it.
And whatever you do, don’t look up the Caribbean. Fine. It’s 2,842,077 km². Four and a half Frances, nearly two Mediterraneans. You looked.