This article takes stock of the contribution of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) to the development of international environmental law. It examines in this regard the jurisdiction of the tribunal and provides an overview of its environmental jurisprudence. It then assesses the potential role of ITLOS in relation to some marine environmental challenges ahead. In particular, it considers the possibility of a request for an advisory opinion on climate change, the settlement of disputes regarding deep seabed mining, and the potential role of the tribunal under a new legal instrument on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction.

This article seeks to illustrate the decisive contribution of the sea environment and particularly the sea-surface circulation (which is determined by the circulation of sea currents and the winds) to the early growth of seafaring and maritime communications in the prehistoric Aegean. Given the means and techniques of navigation in that era, an attempt is made to reveal a dense network of sea routes which vessels could follow through the Aegean, in order to facilitate their trip. These sea routes are primarily based on environmental data and are confirmed concurrently by archaeological evidence and data of ancient sources. Therefore, it is evident that these sea routes played an important role not only in the early inhabitation of the Aegean islands and the foundation of coastal settlements throughout the Aegean area from the sixth millennium BC to the end of the third millennium BC, but in the development of the Aegean civilization during earlier prehistoric times as well.

A holistic perspective of the last 150 years of studies in ocean biology reveals two distinct scientific activities. The first involved scientists in many expeditions from the "Challenger" in the 1870s to the Indian Ocean Expedition in the 1960s. These studies ended with what Ray (1970) has called the "Marine Revolution". This was caused by the need for marine biologists to pay much more attention to practical problems of fisheries, pollution, undersea mining and in particular the biology of the 200-mile economic zone which was established by many maritime nations in the 1970s. The new biological science of the oceans moved from largely descriptive ecology into the field of dynamic processes, holistic models, ocean monitoring and networking of different national and international organizations. Further progress in the biological sciences is needed in these areas, particularly in determining the canying capacity of the seas and oceans and the ecological consequences of removing manne species of fish from the oceans as part of the annual industrial harvest. These problems are only likely to be solved by a consideration of the properties of entire ecosystems, which are often different, to that expected, from the sum of the determinate parts.

Bien que la chitine soit synthétisée par un grand nombre d'espèces animales, unicellulaires ou métazoaires, appartenant notamment aux groupes zoologiques de la lignée des Coelomates Spiralia, la production de chitine en milieu marin est essentiellement due aux Crustacés. Une étude comparée des quelques données analytiques disponibles a permis de tenter de calculer les valeurs de biomasse et de production de chitine dans quelques grands types d'écosystèmes marins, et d'évaluer ainsi l'importance quantitative de la chitine dans les cycles biogéochimiques du carbone et de l'azote. Les principales données actuellement disponibles concernent le plancton de la baie de Calvi (Corse) en Méditerranée, le krill arctique et antarctique, une population de langoustes des côtes de l'Afrique du Sud, et les communautés benthiques infralittorales à algues photophiles des côtes rocheuses de la Corse. Dans tous les cas, la production de chitine a pu être estimée à environ 1g par an et par m2 de substrat rocheux ou de surface océanique. Sur base de ces valeurs de production et de l'étendue relative des principaux écosystèmes marins, la productiontotale annuelle de chitine par les crustacés marins a été évaluée à ± 2,3 milliards de tonnes.