Study and exploration

Navigation on the Black Sea has been known from the time of the ancient Phoenicians. The Greek historian Herodotus described the northern coasts of the sea in the 5th century BC, while the first navigational guides, called peripli (singular: periplus), were written by Greeks in the 4th century BC. The shores of the Black Sea were settled by anumber of peoples, including Slavs, Turks, and Genoese; by the 15th century the Turks were in control of the entire shoreline.

Russian sailors began hydrographic explorations of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea in the 18th century, and these investigations were mostly complete by the end of the 19th century. Regular meteorological observations were initiated in the first quarter of the 19th century, and a biological station at Sevastopol (on the Crimean Peninsula) was founded in 1871. In 1881–82 the Russian naval commander and oceanographer Stepan Osipovich Makarov investigated in detail the two-layer exchange of water through the Bosporus. The first multidisciplinary expedition (1890–91) conducted pioneering hydrologic observations in the deep layers of the sea, in the process discovering thepresence of hydrogen sulfide in these layers. The oceanographic investigations of the Black Sea were largely completed during expeditions organized in the mid-1920s. Since World War II a variety of complex investigations of the sea have been carried out by the nations of the Black Sea basin as well as by other countries.