Slashdot Mirror
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.
Are you sure that flood didn't happen 5 thousand years ago?
The whole point is there were multiple flood events at different points in history. It's one of the reasons the stories are universal is that most areas had some form of great flood at some point in history. Look at it this way. At the end of the last ice age most of the population of Europe as well as much of the rest of the world would have lived along the coast much as they do now. Most of that land is now under water. The coast flooded through both gradual sea level rise and a series of flood events. When you are dealing with oral histories 2,000 years and 6,000 years can be hard to tell apart. Also the much quoted Biblical age of the Earth was calculated in 1650.
"In 1650, Archbishop Ussher published the Ussher chronology, a chronology dating the creation to the night preceding October 23 4004 BC."
There's no real dates in the old testament that can be referenced to modern dates. He came by that date by adding up ages of biblical figures some of whom are claimed to have lived 500 to 900 years. Coming up with an exact month is impressive given the fact few of the births were referenced to the actual age of the parents. Translated it was all guess work based on wild suppositions and had little to do with the Bible itself. Most of the Christian that quote the real age of the Earth have no idea how fabricated the date was. Personally I'll take facts over faith any day of the week.
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.
Be honest, you just wanna see a huge kaboom, like everyone else here!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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:[.]