Migrant Rescue Operations Navigate a Mediterranean Bloodbath
The Seabird is a plane that monitors violence along the world’s deadliest migration route. Piloted by a German NGO, it is showing how European authorities collaborate with militias to harass people crossing the Mediterranean.
The central Mediterranean is among the world’s most surveilled stretches of water, in the search for weapons, migrants, or drugs. This makes Europe’s collective failure to prevent record deaths more striking. (Aris Messinis / AFP via Getty Images)
Beneath the water, the African landmass spears north, pushing into the Eurasian plate where Sicily meets the Italian mainland.
Atop the bedrock, the African plate’s undersea Pelagian platform raises islands into the central Mediterranean. Over the ages, prehistoric marine life sank into porous rock below its grabens, forming a 1.5 trillion-cubic-foot gas reserve.
Several million years later, British Gas sank the Miskar gas field platform into the seafloor. Its gas is pumped to a Shell-run station in coastal Tunisia that exploits weak regulation in order to flare gas, poisoning local olive groves.
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