Five million years ago, the Mediterranean experienced its most catastrophic “tsunami,” known as the Zanclean Mega-Flood. This is the conclusion of a new study conducted by an international team of scholars, which was recently published in the scientific journal "Communications Earth & Environment" of 'Nature' and included, among others, the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV) and the University of Catania. As previously demonstrated, between 5.97 and 5.33 million years ago, the Mediterranean basin was the setting of the most impressive geological-environmental event that occurred during the Neogene, the so-called "Messinian salinity crisis". Due to a general uplift of the area of the present-day Strait of Gibraltar, the Mediterranean Sea lost its connection to the Atlantic Ocean, becoming an isolated basin and, within a geologically brief timeframe (around 600,000 years), almost entirely dried up. What remained of the Mediterranean were certain hypersaline basins into which massive amounts of salt and gypsum precipitated from the evaporating column of water, resulting in rocks that are currently found throughout central-southern Sicily. As a result, the Mediterranean region must have appeared as a vast saline desert expanse, preventing many marine species from living and so causing their extinction. The return of the Mediterranean to its current marine conditions has fueled more than 50 years of heated scientific debate between proponents of a slow refilling (taking approximately 10,000 years) and those advocating for a rapid and catastrophic refilling.
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