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Mediterranean Might Have Filled In Months
An anonymous reader writes "A new model suggests that the Mediterranean Sea was filled in a gigantic flood some 5.3 million years ago. According to Daniel Garcia-Castellanos' paper in Nature, the sill at the Straight of Gibraltar gave way rather suddenly, with 40 cm of rock eroding and the water level rising by 10 m per day at its peak. They imagine a shallow, fast-moving stream of water (around 100 km/hr) several kilometers wide pouring into the basin with a flow greater than a thousand Amazon rivers — that's about 100,000,000 cubic meters per second." The flood would have dropped worldwide sea levels by 9.5 meters, probably triggering climate changes. In this model the Mediterranean filled in anywhere from a few months to two years at the outside.
just had an orgasm.
Are you sure that flood didn't happen 5 thousand years ago?
It has been done, it can be undone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantropa
Whatever the arguments against it, I suppose it is within reason that it could be done. But should it be done?
This research has inspired me to save the planet.
Consider, what are the 3 big problems with AGW?
1. The climate gets warmer than we'd like.
2. The sea levels rise.
3. Mass famine as the farmland goes dry.
4. The extra CO2 acidifies the oceans screwing with the fishies and shellfish.
So now I give you the perfect geo-engineering solution to all these problems!
Step 1: Set off a bunch of Nukes in a desert somewhere, excavating giant holes in the ground.
Step 2: Dig a little path to the ocean and have it fill in the holes.
Benefits: First the ocean levels go down to their regular levels, yay! Second the resulting Nuclear winter offsets global warming, another yay!
Third the desert is now ocean front property and not as deserty, maybe more farm land (do this in Africa for bonus famine offsetting points).
And lastly to handle the acidy oceans... the fallout from the Nukes mutates the fishies and shellfish to adapt to the carbonic acid oceans!
Now can I have my Nobel Peace now? Other than some minor side-effects this should be a pretty effective solution.
I stole this Sig
Julian May already wrote about it in The Golden Torc back in the '80s and her story is way more interesting than this one :-)
Somehow I feel that this hypothesis will mangled beyond recognition so creationists can make it somehow seem as if it supports their idea of young earth and Noah's ark.
This story would be much cooler with a video clip.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
There is geological evidence that the Mediterranean and Black Seas were once cut off from the rest of the worlds oceans in (relatively recent) times. Its possible that the Arctic ocean was also cut off during the ice age, but then it was more an ice shelf than an ocean/sea.Anyway in a million years we may have managed to melt all the (land supported) ice and most of africa would be underwater before the rift opens wide. On the other hand if we cause enough of a greenhouse effect, all the water could be boiled off, and the planet resembles venus.
hm, It's fun to think about, but any single advent 5 million years ago as such as this is sufficiency complex enough to render any proof impossible. They are basing this speed of months on mountain stream modals. Even if the Math was prefect, the result is fundamentally flawed.
Well, before that, it was a lake. Where do you think the aliens stole all the water from?! It was freshwater then, of course. Sadly the Sahara Forest never recovered.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
It does make one wonder about the origin of some flood stories, among others... how long can legends live for?
Perhaps more interestingly, I wonder how many species this event wiped out? Unicorns on the Mediterranean plains perhaps? ;-)
... never saw it coming.
Normally I consider news like this "well nice to know, but it doesn't really affect me".
This case is different, living in a country which is already mostly under sealevel, these 9.5 meters would have made a huge difference.
For example see the map at http://www.rivm.nl/vtv/object_map/o1213n39037.html. If it hadn't happened, we would now have had the island "De Veluwe" :-)
bash$
Dude get a sense of humor. I'm not a creationist.
Oh man, wave of a lifetime.
For the audacious, pump the water back out and refill when a new climate is desired ...
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
This one happened almost 5 million years before modern man first arrived. There are several better floods, if you want to explain the presence of so many flood stories in ancient cultures. Really, there are several candidates that could explain all of those stories about the entire (known) world getting flooded, and Noah isn't the only ancient story about the world being flooded. Frankly, such things being passed down in oral history is only reasonable. If anyone had seen this flood, you can bet that every generation for a very long time would have heard the story!
It's like all those myths about dragons, which are spread through many different cultures. Of course they never really existed, but they have a basis in reality: people probably found dinosaur fossils and the legends grew. Just because things have been legendized doesn't mean they have no basis in fact.
Now *this* is the hard evidence that destroys the very foundation of the "floodgate" criers AND Theogenic Global Deluge deniers!!!11!
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Ok, just once, giving you the benefit of doubt concerning trolling:
The mediterrean doesnt have that many rivers flowing into it, but is in a relatively hot climate.
This means that much more water evaporates than it recieves.
Several times in history, the connection of the mediterrean with the other oceans (i.e. the atlantic) was closed by the way of plate tectonics,ice age, etc (plate of africa going north and forming the alps...)).
During these times, the entire sea evaporated away. IIRC, it was once MUCH deeper, but at the ground there are a few km of salt and sediments from those times.
But such things cannot last. Thousands (if an ice age) or millions of years later there was a breach somewhere to let water enter (be it by way of an earthquake, rising water level of the outside oceans, etc). And after that, erosion had its way.
It must have been an unimagineable awesome display ...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Noah shit??
the head in the sand approach to consideration for others/the future is definitely going to be costly/fatal for many.
water will be the next 'commodity' used to control our behaviours, as we suffocate ourselves.
meanwhile, go jump into your CO factory & go for a spin. you may be right in that it may not matter anymore. we've heard though, that where there's life, there's hope.
the lights are coming up all over now. get ready to join the creators' wwwildly popular newclear powered planet/population rescue initiative/mandate. it's way user friendly (foolproof), & there's never any liesense fees.
this post was deleted from earlier storIEs.
Probably the best small-scale example of how violent this event would have been is given by the flooding of an open-air mine in Malaysia. The rocks separating the mine from the sea became unstable and collapsed, filling the whole thing in minute or so: video!
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
The Mediterranean flood hypothesis is not new - these authors have just done more work on the geology. They lean against the giant waterfall idea ("We do not envisage a waterfall..."), which is a shame - I always liked the idea of a supersonic waterfall.
Be honest, you just wanna see a huge kaboom, like everyone else here!
Not just any kaboom, it's supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!
But- "That creature has stolen the Illudium 236 Explosive Space Modulator!" -Marvin the Martian in "Hare-Way to the Stars".
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
" ...with 40 cm of rock eroding and the water level rising by 10 m per day at its peak..."
40 centimeters ain't much of anything. I doubt it would allow much of the Atlantic Ocean to get in.
Unless, of course, the blurb author meant 40 cubic miles in which case we're talking about one big hole.
But, if that's the case, using the same terminology the water lever was rising by 10 miles per day.
Help, I'm surrounded by ignoramuses.
Fata viam invenient.
And I thought that the Mad is the last remnant of the Tethys ocean caused by plate tectonics as Africa moved north towards Europe. This theory is as old as the hills and was replaced when plate tectonics came of age.
"The flood would have dropped worldwide sea levels by 9.5 meters, probably triggering climate changes."
OMG, something MUST be done to revert the planet to it's pre-Mediterranean-Sea-filling pristine state, or you will all rot in Al Gore's climate Purgatory!
Dam' Anthropgenic Global Warming! Al Gore, you're too late to save us!
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
If Valdrax thought you were a creationist he would hardly have accused you of trolling creationists, would he?
That the earth is 5000 years old, or 6000 years old. In fact, the bible doesn't give a date for any of its events at all. It's really only certain protestant faiths that have the bible as being completely inerrant and the earth as 6000 years old. The rest of us Christians are in it for some good food on Dec 25th and maybe to bomb some muzzies when they get out of line.
This is my sig.
Huge salt desert in Australia which used to be an inland sea. It's about 15m below sea level
Dig 2 canals. boom. you have an inland sea again. Australia stops being a huge desert.
You'd need 2 canals at opposite ends to pump the salt out.
Deleted
And you just know there are cave drawings somewhere showing jackasses trying to body surf in it.
I am pretty sure nuke are mostly heat, with maybe a wave of compression of the heated air. Even if you heat the desert material, it may fly up a bit, and fall down radioactive (or not) around. That would be an extremly inneficient way of digging.
Video, or it didn't happen.
Insightful and funny are really the same thing, except one has a punch line.
So what would happen if the Panama Canal were simply opened up?
Computer models of chaotic systems may not reflect the exact performance of what they are modeling, but they can demonstrate the range of possible and likely results.
And the model is not just based on mountain streams; it is also based on some much larger and more recent events, such as the creation of the Snake River Gorge (300 meters deep in a matter of weeks) and the flooding of the English Channel. Water has enormous power to carve up rock, and the conclusion of the study is not in any way extraordinary; it's what anyone who has ever stood at the bottom of the Snake River Gorge would even find rather obvious.
The problem is that throughout the colonial era it was widely assumed by learned men that the Earth is a stable place where a comfortable equilibrium reigns. What we have found in the last 40 years or so is that the Earth is actually an extraordinarily violent and often inhospitable place, and the relative stability of the last few centuries is an exception, not the rule. If we hang around here long enough we will have to deal with violent changes, and efforts to engineer such a complex and sensitive system might make things worse. The problem is that we are engineering it by pumping carbon into the atmosphere, and a sensible person might conclude knowing what the system is capable of that kicking it might not be such a good idea.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Or, in the immortal words of Billy Gibbons; "Surf's Up!!!"
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I've heard it said before that the only reason so many scientists get those dates is that they base them on assumptions. Assuming the earth is so many billion years old will get you a date that confirms your theories. Like, if you assume that a variable in an equation is a certain number, and depending on the number you assume you'll get a totally different answer than if you assumed a much larger or smaller number. Could someone confirm or deny (with evidence if possible) whether or not this is true for me? I'm very curious about this.
Read something like The Age of the Earth.
you were thinkin of the duck dodgers cartoon (though that was a PU-235 space modulator, I think).
same story, but bugs replaced by daffy...
You really have to consider: ... In brief we can't dismiss that information, but we can't take it for granted, we have to analyze it very carefully to come up with any truth that's there.
1- History, biblical history, legends, or anything that's so ancient is to be made use of, because we don't have a lot of resources about those very ancient times, so we have to make use of any piece of information about that era. Information there should be treated in a special way because of the massive errors in dating, mistranslations, metaphors -the ancient guys really were crazy with those metaphors-,
2- Archeology: Interesting studies have been made in that field, some fancy theories have been developed there, but I believe that very interesting analysis of findings worldwide can help in giving a good understanding of the geography of the ancient world in many stages. Findings offshore in some places like greece, Alexandria/Egypt, a few centuries ago maps found with slight geographical changes, ... Some archeologists suggests that this was the right geography at this point of time.
The 4.54 billion year age of the Earth is not an assumption. It is the conclusion reached over the last few hundred years of effort from geologists and scientists in related fields, built upon the naturalists that came before them.
Not so. The earth is normally in a rather placid state, as it is at this instant. But occasional events happen which are neither placid nor safe. And they happen on a large number of scales. But almost all of the time, at any particular scale, things are relatively stable. Those aren't, however, the parts that are memorable or newsworthy.
E.g., there have been several major extinction events, but there's been only one that killed off over 90% of all species living at the time. (I didn't put a precise number on the major extinction events, because I don't want to define major, and also because the further back one looks the fuzzier one's distinction is WRT precise timing. But around seven.)
Or, another example, the super-volcano that created Yellowstone. It wiped out most species from coast to coast. But as far as I know, it's only happened once. Rare. (There've been signs that it may be revving it's engines for another blast...but it could easily be a false warning. I haven't heard anything about it for the last year, but that doesn't mean anything on the time scale at which this operates.) But MOST of the time it's quite placid, merely producing a bunch of geysers.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
So all we need is to dig another hole of a similar size to get rid of the rising sea levels?
Sounds like a plan.
How many Libraries of Congress is that?
Karma fed to this user will be promptly burnt. Be warned; be wary.
Specifically the article suggests that the mediterrean was blocked between 5.6m to 5.3m years ago.
During these 300.000 years the sea evaporated (totally?)
Sounds interesting. Thanks for the advice! I'll look for it at my local library.
According to Daniel Garcia-Castellanos' paper in Nature, the sill at the Straight of Gibraltar gave way rather suddenly, with 40 cm of rock eroding and the water level rising by 10 m per day at its peak.
I'm relieved to know the Strait of Gibraltar is not gay; I was convinced he was hitting on me the other day.
So was Atlantis originally located in the Mediterranean Basin ? ;-)
Or did I watch too much Stargate ?
Makes for a great experience, maybe noah's ark was a surfing board after all.
I always thought it would be cool to cut a canal from the ocean to Death Valley. With the heat there you would get a lot of evaporation and could sustain a current that you could use for power generation. Plus you could cool the air and get some rainfall. We can make our own little Med.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It was man who blew it up, who else. Read The Last Day of Creation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Day_of_Creation for the full story.
but it is indeed based on assumptions, and the actual parent post is in the scientific spirit, while replies such as yours are in the "prestigious people said so, thus it must be true" category. If you delve to the root of the generally accepted age of the earth, you will find statement such as "The best age for the Earth comes not from dating individual rocks but by considering the Earth and meteorites as part of the same evolving system in which the isotopic composition of lead, specifically the ratio of lead-207 to lead-206 changes over time owing to the decay of radioactive uranium-235 and uranium-238".
in other words, most of solar system considered to have about the same age (an assumption with some evidence suggesting it likely is true), and the decay of isotopes used to date not being affected by any outside source during that time (another assumption with good evidence, but perhaps unknown forces in Universe modified decay rates at certain times?)
Alright, lets do some back of the envelope calculations here:
The Eyre basin is some 171000 cubic kilometers, assuming an average of 15 below sea level.
The entire ocean has some 1347000000 cubi kilometers.
This makes the Eyre Basin approximately 0.000126948775 of the entire oceans in the world, and since the average depth of the ocean is about 3,796 meters, that comes to a roughly 48cm drop, which according to wikipedia should offset the effects of global warming for a century or so.
Current sea level rise has occurred at a mean rate of 1.8 mm per year for the past century,[1][2] and more recently at rates estimated near 2.8 ± 0.4[3] to 3.1 ± 0.7[4] mm per year (1993-2003). Current sea level rise is due significantly to global warming,[5] which will increase sea level over the coming century and longer periods.[6][7] Increasing temperatures result in sea level rise by the thermal expansion of water and through the addition of water to the oceans from the melting of continental ice sheets. Thermal expansion, which is well-quantified, is currently the primary contributor to sea level rise and is expected to be the primary contributor over the course of the next century. Glacial contributions to sea-level rise are less important,[8] and are more difficult to predict and quantify.[8] Values for predicted sea level rise over the course of the next century typically range from 90 to 880 mm, with a central value of 480 mm.
Haha, that was way too much fun.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Thankfully I'm 14 meters above sea level *g*
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The climate has changed in very recent memory more than most of us would ever believe. As recently as the 19th century it was not uncommon for ice floes to make it to New Orleans along the Mississippi River -- something that would have been unthinkable throughout the 20th century. The Earth's climate and geology are capable of rapid change and they experience rapid change much more often than we like to think. Every time we think we have a handle on that, something turns up that makes it obvious it changes more often and more violently than we believed possible before.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
I'm a geology grad student doing a thesis on tectonic geomorphology. I read this article with great interest; my research is on mountain rivers/streams so I know a bit about this kind of thing.
Your alternate theories don't really work, for a variety of reasons. I'm not an expert on all these topics, but I'll explain as best I can and hopefully anyone that might know better will correct me :)
The glacier theory doesn't work because glaciation did not, in fact, reach that far south. The area has stayed at a relatively stable latitude for the past 250 million years at the least (check out a plate reconstruction for 30 Ma compared to the present - the site has earlier reconstructions as well). Even during ice ages, glaciation never got that close to the equator. This is beside the fact that you can actually distinguish between a glacial valley and the kind of thing they're saying this is - based on the shape, type of sediments, and so on.
Tectonic movement doesn't operate on the same time scale as erosional and stream processes. Tectonics has a major influence on the way rivers operate - in fact that's what my research is about - but not in the way you're speculating. You might be surprised how well preserved rock formations are compared to when they originally formed - it sounds like this one is more or less the same as when it was deposited, which is common in most areas. Tectonics is constantly shifting the crust, yes, but not as much or as fast as you're supposing, and even then this is a relatively inactive area.
Now, your final theory is actually about right, but if you change it to follow how river erosion actually works, then you're basically saying what the researchers here are saying. Their description is a bit misleading, depending on how long you think this took to occur (and I would lean more towards it taking longer - two years as they say, or even a little more, but I don't know the specifics of where they came up with that figure).
The valley shape and sediment type suggest a braided river system, with multiple small, fast streams covering a broad area, constantly shifting left and right. As they drop sediment and fill in depressions, the areas where water is not flowing become the new depressions, so the streams shift back and forth, filling the area with sediment evenly. The coarse of meandering rivers (which are more mature and have slower flow rates) can change on sub-decade time scales, and braided rivers are constantly shifting. Now, the important thing is that these braided streams don't carve v-shaped valleys - they spread themselves out broadly, eroding laterally.
Thus, the initial break would have carved a v-shape valley, but it would quickly erode laterally. Most of the initial deluge would not be recorded - it simply wiped everything away. What's left is the wide valley that got flushed out, and the coarse deposits that filled the valley from the braided streams that existed near the end of the deluge, when flow rate was still high but not enough to wipe away absolutely everything.
One of the most interesting things about this research is that it supports the idea that these things can happen catastrophically. In the 1800's, during the early days of geology, there was a huge debate surrounding whether geology happened catastrophically or gradually. Now, the theories those guys were pushing were ridiculous (although a lot of fun), but the question of time scales is still relevant. It became clear by the early 1900's that gradualism is more realistic, and all of geology is essentially based on that - almost anything can happen if you give it enough time. It's the same conceptual leap that you need to understand biology and evolution, but with geology there is even more time to play with, and physics can easily explain how rocks are affected by forces over long time periods.
This led eventuall
Everything you say is true, and it's still true that the earth is relatively placid most of the time. Most of the shifts you are talking about took place in a very short time, and most of the time is spent in between the events. (Climate change seems to be an exception, but even there dramatic shifts tend to take place quickly. It's just that you also get slow drifts.)
And, yes, vinyards now exist in England. The world is a lot warmer than it was. And that has been a slow change (on human scales---it's rather instantaneous on even a historic scale, much less a geologic scale).
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Perhaps this was the basis of the biblical story. Must mean that man was around to tell it to his grandchildren.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
I love science.
It shows us again and again just how small the "gods" of all the various religions are, and that whether or not there may be a god out there, the one written about in the holy books of all the major religions certainly isn't it, because those books and "gods" deeds in it are so clearly limited by the limits of human imagination of the times they were written in.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Before the sill broke at Gibraltar, there would have been a salt lake in the deepest part of the Mediterranean valley (since water escaped only by evaporation). Even today, the amount of water that evaporates from the Mediterranean is greater than the amount that flows into the Mediterranean from rivers. The difference is made up by an inflow of water from the Atlantic Ocean. There is also a smaller outflow current of extra-salty water. During World War II, Allied submarines were able to use these two underwater currents to sneak into or out of the Mediterranean without running their motors, thus being silent and more difficult for German and Italian military vessels patrolling the surface to detect.
I see it all now this event was caused by early cave-men they first invented fire which was then used to warm their caves.... the cave-men and cave women liked the heated caves so much that they moved to bigger caves with more heat!!!! and hence the amount of CO2 was increased leading to 'global cave warming' which in turn lead to massive geological shifts and flooding.!!!!!
FragHARD or don't frag at all
Thank you. Reading responses like yours is one of the main reasons I troll these comments, and I really do appreciate it when someone more informed can point out when I make mistakes and give cogent explanations as to why.
The combination of the reliance on a computer model, the lack of what you described as gradualism, and the attention grabbing, catastrophic implications described gave me pause. That combination has given rise to a number of unreliable headlines lately. However, I'm excited that there seems to be a stronger foundation to this model, and I look forward to hearing more as they progress with their research.
Thanks again!