Mediterranean Sea filled in less than two years: study

http://phys.org/news/2009-12-mediterranean-sea-years.html

by curtis • 10 years ago

149 60 10 years ago

ksgifford• 10 years ago

XKCD did a comic about this phenomenon a few years ago. The story is set in the far future when the Med has dried up again, and the next flood that refills it is imminent. http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/

mirimir• 10 years ago

"video": http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/

intrasight• 10 years ago

"Oh noes, something has gone wrong!"

teh_klev2• 10 years ago

What's special about the "Special" frames, in particular "Debated" frames?

skykooler• 10 years ago

And even won a Hugo award for it!

eganist• 10 years ago

Entirely offtopic, but how is it that the xkcd blog suffers from such a terrible spam comment problem?

clort• 10 years ago

Its a test, to measure how intelligent the spambots are getting.

  See https://xkcd.com/810/

jeffwass• 10 years ago

What's the best way to 'read' that xkcd storyline?

BurningFrog• 10 years ago

"We do not envisage a waterfall, as is often represented: instead the geophysical data suggests a huge ramp, several kilometres wide, descending from the Atlantic to the dry Mediterranean...," the scientists said.

Can anyone help me get a mental image of this?

beeboop• 10 years ago

Imagine a big ass river. Pretty much the same concept, but in reverse.

ceejayoz• 10 years ago

Something like this on a much, much larger scale.

https://youtu.be/_yCnQuILmsM?t=1m19s

intortus• 10 years ago

""We also know that the velocity of the water flow must have been more than 300 kilometres an hour."

I'm not sure how to visualize this.

nerfhammer• 10 years ago

I feel like the friction against the air would be enough to cause tornadoes.

ars2• 10 years ago

A snow avalanche is probably the closest thing you can see today.

Try to find one where it hits trees and see what it does to them, otherwise it's hard to really see the scale and force.

alva• 10 years ago

It is an incredible thing to think about!

chiaro• 10 years ago

There's a few simulations around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xQeEgPhSfI

anotheryou2• 10 years ago

is that the flood the bible refers too?

johnloeber• 10 years ago

No, this happened about 5.6 million years ago, according to the study. That's well before the advent of the homo sapien or any prehistoric ancestors developing a language complex enough to tell such a story.

Fwiw, there are more recent large floods that serve as possible inspiration for the flood stories you can find in any major religion.

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

For example:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/evidence-for-a-...

A lot of the older books of the bible were collected from Mesopotamian mythology. Based on the stories it's likely something big really did happen, but no one is quite sure what.

I've always been fascinated by the Scottish Tsunami/Storegga Slide of ~6000BC, which was about 70ft high at the coast and ran some 50 miles inland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

shiro3• 10 years ago

I thought the world wasn't 5 million years old according to the bible.

ygmelnikova• 10 years ago

A common myth. The bible doesn't say the world was created in 6 days, but in 6 'yoms'. A yom in Hebrew means 'a defined period of time'. Like an epoch, or a year, a day or a minute etc.

The bible was translated into English in the middle ages.

Wikipedia has a definition as 'A long, but finite span of time', among others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom

jammycakes• 10 years ago

It's not as clear cut as that. The Hebrew word used for a "day" in Genesis 1 can also mean an extended period of time.

espadrine• 10 years ago

The Zanclean flood seems to have occured 5.3 million years ago, while the genus Homo has emerged 2.5 million years ago. Another way to look at it is that the first human was closer to witnessing Lee Sedol's win against AlphaGo than it was to seeing that flood.

Humans started developing their first language around 1.8 million years ago. Unless apes were able to somehow express the idea of a flood before having a language, it seems unlikely.

vortico2• 10 years ago

Lee Sedol's win against AlphaGo

Haha, yes. A truly epoch-defining event.

maaku2• 10 years ago

Not sure why you are being down-voted, as it is a fair question. But it was too long ago to be a part of human memory. Perhaps the Black Sea deluge though...

Gibbon1• 10 years ago

Maybe, however we have recent flooding events that are almost biblical. There are the recent in my lifetime floods in the Mississippi valley 1993 and 2011. Not to mention the 1927 flood. Ohio River flood of 1937 which I think is mythologized in the Johnny Cash song 5ft high and rising.

In the Great Flood of 1862 the California Central Valley flooded, 6000 square miles, some of which was still under water 6 months later.

While I suspect such floods don't occur in the Euphrates and Tigris basins now, 5000 years ago when the climate was wetter, perhaps such floods similar to the Great Flood of 1862 did occur every few hundred years.

wyldfire• 10 years ago

Wouldn't it be interesting if ancient historians found evidence of the flood and it made its way into mythology? "Science inspires religion."

anotheryou2• 10 years ago

you might want to read this: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160118-the-atlantis-style-m...

curtis• 10 years ago

There is a similar theory about the Black Sea: the Black Sea deluge hypothesis [1].

From Wikipedia:

The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized catastrophic rise in the level of the Black Sea circa 5600 BC from waters from the Mediterranean Sea breaching a sill in the Bosphorus strait.

(This one, if true, is pretty interesting because it occurred within fairly recent human history.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

DrScump• 10 years ago

This has been theorized to be the origin of Great Flood myths, both Biblical and those of earlier cultures.

lostlogin• 10 years ago

The embellishing is pretty amazing, and added the bit about it going down again. Maybe if we repent hard enough we can get the sea level lower?

yeldarb• 10 years ago

Is there a contemporary basin ripe for a catastrophic flood from the sea in the event of an earthquake?

Mandatum• 10 years ago

New Orleans, many areas of China (see 1931 China Floods), areas along the Ganges Delta, also look at the Special Flood Hazard Areas assigned in the US.

maaku2• 10 years ago

Netherlands.

nostromo• 10 years ago

Death Valley could flood if there was some way for sea water to get to it. If the climate changed and it started to rain there often, it could also make a massive inland freshwater lake.

There once was many lakes in this region:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Pleistoc...

cossatot• 10 years ago

It does occasionally get standing water during winter/spring rainstorms. I remember hearing about someone windsurfing there in 2005.

cmsmith• 10 years ago

freshwater lake

Death Valley has no outlets (is endorheic), so it would be a salt water lake (at least after all the surface salt had time to dissolve).

Tuna-Fish• 10 years ago

Nothing the size of the Med, of course. There are several major below-sealevel basins in Northern Africa. The most significant is probably the Qattara Depression[1], which probably won't ever naturally flood, but is the target of many plans to flood it intentionally for power production and improvements in local climate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression

waterlesscloud• 10 years ago

Vaguely related is the Salton Sea in southern California. It's been a large lake in the geological past, but it most recently filled in due to some bad irrigation planning in 1905. It filled up in about 2 years.

vortico2• 10 years ago

The Mosul Dam holds back a lake which would flood Baghdad in a matter of hours if damaged by earthquake or bombings.

grumblestumble2• 10 years ago

If you like Sci-Fi, spoiler alert but Julian May's Pliocene Saga is set around this event.

rodgerd• 10 years ago

Just don't read too far into the series. The first four books are pretty good, but the further on it goes...

grumblestumble2• 10 years ago

Good to know. I read the original series about 20 years ago and was recently thinking of catching up on the rest of it.

lakkal• 10 years ago

The Gandalara books by Randall Garrett as well.

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

WildwoodClaire's video on the Messinian Salinity Crisis gives an excellent backround on the paleogeology of the Mediterranean basin, particularly as expressed through salt deposits up to 3500 meters thick, but also with considerable evidence of ancient channels both in the regions surrounding the Mediterranean (as at the Aswan High Dam) and underneath the existing sea.

Her enthusiasm is also infectious.

https://youtu.be/U5qTQpws5H0

sandra_saltlake• 10 years ago

Mesopotamia was flooding quite frequently.

keypusher• 10 years ago

[2009]

tim333• 10 years ago

It reminds me of the Red Sea Dam idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_Dam

Mediterranean Sea filled in less than two years: study

Related Stories