Once upon a time some engineer hatched a plan to drain the Mediterranean Sea. He was dead fucking serious too. This video is just under 7 minutes in length. I found it fascinating. What would have likely happened had his plan come to fruition?
Been there, done that.
Mediterranean Sea Was Once a Mile-High Salt Field
About 6 million years ago, the
Strait of Gibraltar linking the Mediterranean with the Atlantic Ocean was closed and instead, two channels — one in Northern Morocco and another in Southern Spain — fed the sea with salty water and let it flow out, said study co-author Rachel Flecker, a geologist at the University of Bristol in England.
But during the Messinian Salinity Crisis, as this particular event is known, Eurasia was colliding with Africa, squishing the outlet flow for the Mediterranean Sea. But tectonic shifts left the basin floor below the outlet channel between the two water bodies intact. Dense salty water from the Atlantic rushed in, but couldn't leave the sea. Water evaporated; salt piled high; and sea life collapsed.
"It wasn't a nice place," Flecker said.
In a series of pulses over about 600,000 years, the sea dried out, and a 1-mile-high (1.5 kilometer) salt wall grew across the Mediterranean seafloor, a "bit like the Dead Sea, a huge brine field," Flecker told LiveScience. (In places, it might have been even higher.)
Then, in a geologic flash of time just 200 years' long, waters from the Atlantic cut through the Strait of Gibraltar and
flooded the Mediterranean, refilling the sea. [
50 Amazing Facts About the Earth]
