A revisiting of early 18th-century environmental data to identify Gulf of Lion properties before the industrial era

Locritani, Marina; Garvani, Sara; Tamburello, Giancarlo; Guarnieri, Antonio; Manzella, Giuseppe

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-3553-2025

Articles | Volume 17, issue 7

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-3553-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-17-3553-2025

© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 7

Data description paper

|

28 Jul 2025

Data description paper |

| 28 Jul 2025

A revisiting of early 18th-century environmental data to identify Gulf of Lion properties before the industrial era

Marina Locritani, Sara Garvani, Giancarlo Tamburello, Antonio Guarnieri, and Giuseppe Manzella

Data sets

Sea Level data reported in Histoire Physique de la mer (1725) of L.F. Marsili and transformed to calculate the M2 tidal amplitude Marina Locritani et al. https://doi.org/10.13127/histoiremarsili/sealevel

Water density data extrapolated by water weight measurements reported in Histoire Physique de la mer (1725) of L.F. Marsili Marina Locritani and Sara Garvani https://doi.org/10.13127/histoiremarsili/waterdensity

Bathymetric data extrapolated by profiles reported in Histoire Physique de la mer (1725) of L.F. Marsili Marina Locritani et al. http://oceano.bo.ingv.it/erddap/search/index.html?page=1&itemsPerPage=1000&searchFor=marsili

Short summary

The Histoire physique de la mer, written by Luigi Ferdinando Marsili in 1725, was one of the first treatises to analyse the science of the sea. However, it is difficult to understand Marsili's original data. This paper reports the results of a major effort that has been undertaken to re-evaluate Marsili's observations, converting historical measurements into modern units – water weight to water density – with bathymetric profiles mapping the locations where these measurements were made and sea level variations alongside consideration of the associated error.