THE
MARROBBIO

Peter Prictoe

In another article (Limping Annie in the Desert) I told of the manner in which the almost tideless Mediterranean Sea rose several feet one night and swamped an aircraft that had force landed by the north African shore of Libya.

That was in the forties but in 1986 I happened to be in Malta with my wife together with a cousin and her husband and we hired a car for the week and toured the islands. Knowing that a particular restaurant in Marsaxlokk was noted for its seafood we went to that southern fishing port, parked the car on the quay and ordered our food.

We had finished the excellent meal and were enjoying a drink when we observed the sea in the large bay actually rise, swell over the quay and surround the car- the water rising well up the wheels a height of many feet above the original sea level. After a few minutes at a sort of high tide the water subsided as quickly as it had risen-we had seen the Marrobbio!

Whilst any body of water is subject to the influence of the moon and, to a lesser extent, the sun ( It is said that precision instruments can detect the tide in a saucer) , the Mediterranean Sea is, for practical purposes, almost tideless- especially in the central and eastern parts.

The Marrobbio therefore is an anomaly that has yet to be fully explained. It is confined to the central area of the Sea and is most frequent in south western Sicily, often occurring at Trapani, Marsala and Mazara del Vallo according to the well known sailor and author Ernle Bradford who I recollect living for some years in a quayside house at Kalkara in Malta. The owner of the restaurant at Marsaxlokk said that it happened several times a year and, as I have related elsewhere, it can be occur on the coast of North Africa.

The Marrobbio can be a single occurrence or a series of waves and gives no warning. Formerly it was believed that it resulted from the combination of a long prevailing wind in either the eastern or western basins of the Mediterranean coinciding with a sharp change in atmospheric pressure over the whole sea but today it is thought to arise from a sharp change in atmospheric pressure in either basin - causing a surge of water from one section to the other that is most felt at the narrow shallow central ridge that stretches from Sicily southwards past Malta and down to the Libyan shore.

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