Ancient Flood Left Its Mark in the Mediterranean Sea

[Judi Lynn]

By Charles Choi | March 23, 2018 2:07 pm

One of the largest floods in Earth’s history may have deluged the Mediterranean Sea more than 5.3 million years ago, leaving behind a mass of debris roughly the size of Greece’s largest island, Crete, researchers say.

Scientists investigated a roughly 640,000-year span of time starting nearly 6 million years ago when the Mediterranean became a hyper-salty lake. This so-called Messinian salinity crisis “was the most abrupt environmental change, at a planetary scale, since the end of the Cretaceous — that is, a sudden mass extinction, including dinosaurs, due to a meteorite impact,” said study lead author Aaron Micallef, a marine geoscientist at the University of Malta.

This event happened because the Mediterranean became isolated from the Atlantic Ocean. The dry climate of the region caused the Mediterranean to evaporate almost completely, with sea levels there dropping by up to 7,800 feet.

During this time, a layer of salt up nearly 1 mile thick was deposited at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, equivalent to 5 percent of global salt mass of the oceans.

More:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/03/23/mediterranean-sea-flood/#.WrW4zIjwbIU

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