In the previous article we mentioned that the geological crust moved back and forth several times but how many times did it shifit? how long did the MSC last? To find out, keep reading.
Scientists identified 16 different climate cycles in the initial phase of the MSC which lasted a really but really long time. In fact, researchers estimated that the MSC went on for 600,000 years (no, it’s not a typo. It went on for 600 thousand years!!!) with the driest period being touched 5.6 million years ago.
Source: https://www.saltgiant-etn.com/
According to several simulations, the Mediterranean Sea dropped by a significant amount but the water that was left was incredibly saturated so all the salt crystals kept precipitating at the bottom of the sea.
This phenomenon went on for years and the Mediterranean Salt Giant became bigger and bigger, in fact, it is calculated that it can be 3 km (1.86 miles) thick meaning the sea remained very salty and its level very low for hundreds of thousands of years.
Multiple layers of salt under the Mediterranean Sea (source: https://medsalt.wordpress.com/)
Needless to say, this had a massive and destructive impact on marine wildlife.
In fact, the extremely high salinity of the sea made it uninhabitable and several marine creatures either migrated somewhere else or died. One piece of evidence supporting this theory is the fact that there are hardly any deep-sea creatures which are unique to the Mediterranean Sea because all of them died during the MSC.
However, if it’s true that the marine wildlife died, it is also true that many land animals began to roam around the land-bridges that began forming among islands and continents (from Africa to Italy, from Africa to Greece, from Africa to Türkiye, etc).
Let’s get back to the Rabbit King of Menorca.
These land-bridges allowed several normal-sized rabbits to peacefully walk from mainland Spain to Menorca and the lack of predators made it grow to become the Rabbit King of Menorca.
However, this is not the only case as also other animals, such as hippopotamuses, lions, hamsters and several birds crossed the land from Northern Africa to Mediterranean countries and vice versa.
In the last part of the MSC, the geological crust shifted again opening back up the Gibraltar strait and allowing the water from the Atlantic Ocean to fill and flow back into the Mediterranean basin.
Depth of the Strait of Gibraltar (source: Physical Oceanography Group – University of Malaga, Spain)
However, geological shiftings are ever-going processes and in the future things might change again but we will explore this in another article.
Stay tuned, dear Mediterranean enthusiasts