When was the mediterranean created

The surge of water created a channel several kilometres wide that would become the Strait of Gibraltar. The slope to the Mediterranean was around two degrees, he reported in Nature.

A team led by Garcia-Castellanos used data from boreholes and seismic surveys in the area to reconstruct the deluge conditions in a computer model. The floodwater discharged around m cubic metres of water every second, creating a km-long channel across the strait. This is when water from the Atlantic suddenly broke through, flooding the basin at amazing rates to fill the Mediterranean Sea in about 2 years. Messinian Salinity Crisis Wikipedia. When the Mediterranean Was a Desert Nature.

Discover the natural wonders of Earth on over radio stations nationwide. The Mediterranean Desert. Download PDF zip file. Artistic interpretation of flooding of the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar view from southwest of strait , which, if confirmed, would be the largest documented flood in the geologic record.

The Mediterranean Sea formed during repeated, messy collisions of the African—Arabian plate with the Eurasian Plate and nearby microplates during the Alpine orogeny. A sill near the island of Sicily separates it into western and eastern segments. The Mediterranean has an average depth of about 4, ft; its deepest point is the Calypso Deep at more than 17, ft.

The sea is about 2, miles wide from east to west, about the distance from Atlanta to San Francisco. The largest of the outlets is the Strait of Gibraltar, which separates Europe and Africa by a mere 9 miles.

Barbuzano, J. Published on 26 February The authors. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited. Iddris et al. Skip to content Recently identified sediments traversing the Strait of Gibraltar may be evidence of a flood that refilled the desiccated Mediterranean basin more than 5 million years ago. Zanclean Flood Hypothesis The period of the dry Mediterranean might have ended quickly when the Strait of Gibraltar reopened 5. A composite seismic profile shows the Messinian erosion surface MSC, purple line on the eastern side of the Strait of Gibraltar.

This unconformity is interpreted as the erosion channel excavated into Miocene sediments during late Messinian Salinity Crisis or earliest Pliocene. Credit: Garcia-Castellanos et. From AGU Journals. One hypothesis suggests a megaflood rapidly refilled the Mediterranean.

These findings build on a Nature study, which showed water violently rushed into the desiccated Mediterranean after shifting tectonic plates reopened the Strait of Gibraltar. The deluge carved a kilometer-long channel along the seafloor as it filled the western part of the basin. But an open question is whether the flood also tore through the eastern Mediterranean, over a seafloor cliff separating the shallower continental crust in the west from the deeper oceanic crust in the east.

This natural barrier, called the Malta Escarpment, towers more than three kilometers high in some places and is located to the east of modern-day Sicily and Malta. The new study, led by Aaron Micallef, a marine geologist at the University of Malta, found the sediments buried near Sicily were likely deposited by the megaflood—a finding that implies a violent influx of water throughout the Mediterranean. Micallef and his colleagues focused on the Malta Escarpment because megaflood water flowing east would have encountered this natural blockade, making it a logical place to find sediments deposited by water that breached the cliff.

The researchers used seismic reflection imaging, which involves directing sound waves toward the sea bottom and measuring the time it takes them to return.