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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.
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?
That could have been the Black Sea flooding. It would have been just as impressive. And a bit later than the Mediterranean.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The creation of the Bosporus Strait is probably a better candidate: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_theory
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]