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Mediterranean Might Have Filled In Months

Posted by kdawson on from the white-water-to-die-for dept.

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.

3 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Yet another great /. science discussion kicks off. by Valdrax · · Score: -1, Troll

    Yeah, great. Thanks for leading off another science article with:
    - Post #1 - A crass joke.
    - Post #2 - Trolling creationists.

    There goes all hope anything intelligent being discussed like the Messianian salinity crisis that the article refers to. (i.e. Why something as deep as the Mediterranean was dry instead of a lake in the first place.

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  2. Re:Chaos theory by psnyder · · Score: 1, Troll

    it is all based on observations made by rather imperfect human eyes

    Don't confuse this with actual observation. It's far from it.

    This "research" is little more than a computer game where the programmer puts in the physics of a closed environment, and plays with some numbers with a big incentive to get an impressive result in order to get published.



    Computer models are the spam messages of complex science.

    • Some kind of attention grabbing headline
    • A number of people believe what they say and propagate it all over
    • Even knowledgeable people often take second to realize what it is before discarding it
  3. Re:Ugh... I know where this is going... by radtea · · Score: 0, Troll

    Noah's ark.

    Don't you mean Utnapishtim's ark? The Noah story is just a thinly edited rip of the Sumerian flood story, and it's really irritating to see an second-hand imitation get all the credit.

    If people are going to take ancient writings literally they really ought to focus on the primary sources, and not the secondary copies like the Noah story.

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