I assume it looked very similar to this apocalyptic 1993 video from a landslide in Malaysia (which formed a new cove nearly 1 km wide) except many times wider (the Gibraltar strait is around 14 km wide) and higher:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ma0SVjMHA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ma0SVjMHA</a><p>Starting at around 1:00 you can see the entire pacific ocean looming behind this thin and crumbling earth wall. And then the water comes.<p>Here is the cove it created: <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/@4.402039,100.5917748,1546m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/maps/@4.402039,100.5917748,1546m/data...</a>
Once things get in motion it can go very quickly.
It must have looked like this: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDmoXkF-g9I" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDmoXkF-g9I</a><p>Starting very small and then growing exponentially.<p>When I was a child we also did something like in the video. The initial channel was very narrow and we could have easily stopped it by putting back some sand, but 15 minutes later through the game of erosion the stream was so intense that it became impossible to even cross it.
Remove that annoying sticky header with this js snippet pasted in your url bar:<p>javascript:(function()%7B(function () %7Bvar i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3Bfor (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7Bif (getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed') %7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()
Before the flood I wonder what life was like in the basin? In particular steeper areas of the outer edges must have been fascinating. During the summer the warm but relatively cool air at sea level I assume could sink down into the basin. With the basin a mile or so deeper the temperature of the sinking air would have increased drastically as the pressure increased. I’ve not done the calculations but my intuition is the temperature would make hot days in Death Valley look cool.
The flood that took place in the Mediterranean was what inspired the plot of the biggest XKCD ever, a time-lapse slideshow that took place over 123 days and 3,102 panels: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(xkcd)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(xkcd)</a> .<p>Here's a site that lets you step through it one panel at a time: <a href="http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/" rel="nofollow">http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/</a> . Well worth a read.
If there was some way across, the Dead Sea valley would become an ocean. I have always wondered that no river or channel naturally was able to overcome te relatively thin mountain range in between.
If a 2KM bed of salt became liberated and released into the med, and IIRC both the bosphorus and the pillars of hercules are subject to tides...<p>How long would it take to reach "homeostasis"?<p>there's already semi-stable thermohaline layers between the med and the atlantic. differential current flows depending on depth.
apparently, a Twitter thread led to the writing of the linked article, which publicizes careful modelling done by science teams years earlier. The "gonzo enthusiastic" voice of the author strongly contrasts to the science museum core of the subject. Perfect? nah, but modern and .. now people can see it. "publicity" you might call it.. not bad, definitely worth ten minutes to see one of the great geological events of pre-history.
i always thought a giant asteroid hit the atlantic and moved Americas further away from EU/Africa and spit lot of water/sand on north Africa, wich covered the Sahara forest with sand and killed ancient Egypt civilization and the whole South America civilization