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.
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?
Julian May already wrote about it in The Golden Torc back in the '80s and her story is way more interesting than this one :-)
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
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.
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?
I am intrigued and invite you to join our Evil Overlords World Domination Club.
Our plan is evil. Man, it is so evil!
It is a bad, bad plan, that will hurt many people that are good!
I think it’s great, because it’s so bad!
Prerequisites to enter:
- An evil lair (preferably under a volcano).
- At least 100 minions (get the starter pack today!) or 10 lifeforms with super-powers.
- Super-secret secret super-weapon.
- Read the club rules.
- And most importantly: An evilness of at least 10,000 on the trough-the-roof Schwarzschild scale!
We also have a dress code. But as long as you look really evil, you’re welcome. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
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.
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:[.]
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