Aloisi G. et al / Nature
Map shows the Ocean’s water level 5.3 million years ago
Until recently, it was not understood how approximately one million cubic kilometers of salt accumulated on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea in a short period of time. Now, scientists have discovered why.
The Messinian Salinity Crisis happened approximately between 5.97 and 5.33 million years ago. As explained by , salt deposits began to accumulate in the eastern Mediterranean Sea due to a partial restriction of the connection between this sea and the Atlantic Ocean.
Later, and in a short space of time (about 10 thousand years), salt deposits originated throughout the Mediterranean, which caused a rapid water flow, which ended up resulting in a drop in water levels of between 1.7 and 2.1 kilometers in the eastern Mediterranean and around 850 meters in the western sector: a loss of up to 70% of the total water volume of the Mediterranean.
This division of the event into phases is new, and was done thanks to a new publication in Nature this Monday and led by the Paris Institute of World Physics, the CNRS, which ended up realizing more details about this great and, until now, mysterious event. They even created a topographic map of the region at the time.
Aloisi G. et al / Nature
The various layers of salt that settled in the Mediterranean.
This water lossexplains the LBV, affected both the terrestrial ecosystem and the landscape of the entire Mediterranean basin. Furthermore, the reduction in the weight of the earth’s crust caused by the disappearance of this enormous mass of water may have triggered volcanic activity in the region.
This “crustal relief”, as the newspaper describes it, influenced the global climate, but also geography itself: in the final moments of this salinity crisis, the level of the Mediterranean was about a kilometer below the level of the Atlanticcreating a difference so extreme that it ended up causing the collapse of the Strait of Gibraltar.
