Mediterranean megaflood confirmed
There were probably other regional floods as well. But a global flood- no way possible.
Once upon a time there was a massive flood across the Mediterranean Sea, an in-pouring of water so huge that it excavated a canyon five kilometres deep and 20 kilometres long, and created a waterfall with a 1.5 kilometre drop.
Evidence for the great flood, long hypothesised, has now been found by a team of researchers led by geoscientist Aaron Micallef from the University of Malta.
And while several Mediterranean traditions feature great flood narratives, the earliest arising from Sumeria and already well enough known to be recorded in cuneiform by the seventeenth century BCE, this one is unlikely to have been the inspiration.
In a paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, Micallef and colleagues present geological evidence for an event known as the Zanclean megaflood, which took place around 5,300,000 years ago.
The flood was preceded by a catastrophic geologic transformation called the Messinian salinity crisis (MSC), described by the researchers as “the most abrupt, global-scale environmental change since the end of the Cretaceous”.
In the Mediterranean region, the crisis was caused by the closure of what today is known as the strait of Gibraltar, cutting the passage between the sea and the Atlantic Ocean. This occurred around six million years ago.