How long is mediterranean sea

At that time, the ancestors of many animals like Felids, Canids or Rodents were also already roaming on the earth's surface. It is around that time that the water coming from the Ocean into the Sea was totally "cut off" or nearly so.

This resulted from different factors, amongst which the movement of tectonic plates for a definition, see another article on our website: "What if mountains came out of the Mediterranean Sea? Little by little, the Mediterranean totally dried up, just as if we left a full saucepan of salt water to evaporate on the fire: it would leave only a thin crust of salt at the bottom.

This is exactly what happened, and important layers of salt piled up at the bottom of the Mediterranean. From time to time, some water would succeed to come through and would fill in, for a while, the bottom of the basin before evaporating.

The Mediterranean had turned into a vast salt desert. This situation lasted for nearly ' years. This is why, in some places under the bottom of the sea, you can find layers of salt which are more than meters thick.

Finally, around 5. Water from the ocean arrived into the Mediterranean basin, creating a gigantic waterfall, with a flow rate a thousand times bigger than the flow rate of the Niagara falls! And this is how, only a few centuries later which is a really short time on the geological scale , the Mediterranean Sea was normally filled again.

The Med has a number of major internationally recognized seas within it's vast area. Archive Content Please note: This page has been archived and its content may no longer be up-to-date. Toggle navigation. Language English. The Mediterranean — a sea surrounded by land Cirali beach, on the Mediterranean Sea, one of the few remaining nesting sites for the loggerhead turtles. Children Morocco. Isotti, A. In a recent analysis published in Earth-Science Reviews, Garcia-Castellanos and his team identified a pocket of sediments that may have been deposited by the megaflood.

Without this cataclysmic reconnection with the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean as we know it today would not exist. And today, the Mediterranean Sea is a vital pump for global water circulation. Evaporation infuses its waters with an extra dose of salt, which spills into the Atlantic and helps drive oceanic conveyor belts that circumnavigate the planet, influencing temperatures, storm patterns, and more.

As modern temperatures continue their steady march upward, and the ice caps dwindle at the poles, it's "pretty blooming important" to figure out what processes led to the planet we see today, says Rachel Flecker , a geologist at the University of Bristol.

The only water source keeping the body stable is a steady flow from the neighboring Atlantic Ocean, pouring through a narrow channel between Spain and Morocco, the Strait of Gibraltar. Many millions of years ago, tectonic shifts deep below the surface may have forced the landscape upward, crimping the vital connection between the Mediterranean and Atlantic. Waters likely continued to flow into the basin, but the shift would have severed the escape route for dense saline currents running along the basin floor to reach the open ocean.

Some researchers suggest the region nearly dried up before the flood, leaving a cavernous basin dipping more than a mile below current sea level. All that stood between the empty basin and the mighty Atlantic may have been a narrow spit of land where the Gibraltar Strait is today though the exact width of this former land bridge is still uncertain.

Some 5. The breach likely started as a trickle over the natural dam connecting modern-day Europe to Africa, according to their models from a study. But erosion quickly took over.

As the water mounted, it scoured out a deepening path that allowed still more water to pass. At its peak, the flow may have gushed at million cubic meters per second, filling the sea in two years or less. Such an event would have excavated at least million olympic swimming pools worth of sediment, cutting a channel through the Strait of Gibraltar and carving a canyon that extends into the seafloor.

The western portion of the Mediterranean Sea is further subdivided into three major submarine basins. The eastern portion of the Mediterranean Sea is subdivided into two principal basins: the Ionian Basin and the Levantine Basin. There are many major subdivisions of the Mediterranean Sea. The Mediterranean Sea experiences a typical Mediterranean climate with hot and dry summers and mild and rainy winters.

The Mediterranean Sea hosts numerous beautiful islands. Covering a total area of about 25, km 2 , the island of Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea.