The Golfe du Lion (Gulf of Lion) is a wide embayment of the Mediterranean coastline of Languedoc-Roussillon, reaching from the border with Catalonia in the west to Toulon. Rivers that empty into the Golfe du Lion are the Tech, Têt, Aude, Orb, Hérault, Vidourle , and the Rhône. The continental shelf is exposed here as a wide coastal plain, and the offshore terrain slopes rapidly to the Mediterranean's abyssal plain. Much of the coastline is in lagoons and salt marsh.
The Golfe du Lion cannot be dismissed as a simple passive continental margin, however. It results from Oligocene-Miocene anti-clockwise rotation of the Corsican-Sardinian Block against the European Craton. This extension rejuvenated a very complex tectonic framework inherited from the Tethyan evolution and the Pyrenean orogeny. The Eocene mountain-building event that built the Pyrenees compressed and thickened the entire crust. Oil geologists predict that there will be considerable oil deposits at the seaward margins of the Golfe.
The chief port on the Gulf is Marseille. The fishing industry in the Gulf is based on hake (Merluccius merluccius), being bottom-trawled, long-lined and gill-netted and currently declining from over-fishing.
This is the area of the famous cold, blustery catabatic wind called the Mistral.
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