NEW EVIDENCE CONVINCES RESEARCHERS THAT A MEGAFLOOD REFILLED THE ENTIRE MEDITERRANEAN, INSANELY FAST
If you are somehow reading this and aren’t a geek, kudos to you. And while I am a geek, I must admit that it’s pretty surprising I even know to geek out about this. But before I get to that, let’s get into the basics here. If you didn’t already know, the Mediterranean Sea was for a time mostly dried up. In other words, it was land, insanely salty land. Scientists and researchers know this for a fact. But until now, they weren’t sure they had enough evidence to say with (scientific) certainty that it was a megaflood that refilled it, fast, over 5 million years ago.
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THE MEDITERRANEAN WOULD DRY UP AGAIN IF NOT FOR THE ATLANTIC OCEAN CONSTANTLY REFILLING IT
And here’s where the geeks will have some happier nuance, because even the word megaflood is so unusual that spell checks everywhere don’t even consider it a real word. But the refilling of the Mediterranean was not only a megaflood, it was likely the largest the world has ever seen. And even the sharpest squares will geek out once they see the context. So how did this sea dry up in the first place? Easy, it still evaporates today to the tune of 4 feet a year. If not for the Atlantic Ocean constantly refilling it thru the Strait of Gibraltar, it would dry up. Again.
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THE MEGAFLOOD THAT REFILLED THE MEDITERRANEAN HAPPENED SHOCKINGLY FAST
And the Med isn’t a small sea, by any means. It has a surface area of 970,000 square miles, with an average depth of 1,500 meters. And yes, I’m mixing standards of measurement on purpose. But now researchers think the Med really did refill from a megaflood, and fast. Their current data modeling suggests that once water started pouring back in, the Mediterranean Sea refilled in between 2 and 16 years. But if you’re not a geek, maybe that doesn’t sound fast. So here goes; in that time frame somewhere between 2.4 and 3.5 billion cubic feet of water came back in per second. Per second. Even if you’re not a geek, that there is now setting the bar for a megaflood.
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A FANTASY SERIES DOVE INTO THIS AS THEORY, AND EVEN THE AUTHORS DIDN’T IMAGINE THIS MEGAFLOOD
So how and why am I geeking out about this, besides the obvious? Because the very official theory of this supposed megaflood didn’t really begin until the discovery of an erosion channel stretching from the Gulf of Cadiz on Spain’s Atlantic coast to the Alboran Sea east of the Strait of Gibraltar. In 2009. But I read a fantasy series that started in 1981 called The Gandalara Cycle that was based on the premise that an earlier human species evolved in the salty desert that is now (again) the Mediterranean Sea. And yes, the plot line included a megaflood pending at the end. But alas, even the authors didn’t imagine how insanely fast the reality was.
You can read more about the study here.
