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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 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.