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The flood that filled the Mediterranean Sea - in one year
- nyolfen 5y agoit's a neat story but i find this style of writing unreadably grating
- bandibus 5y agoSorry to hear - but thanks for reading it anyway!
- las_balas_tres 5y agoHere's more of a textbook style of the account if that's your style. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood .Or here is a creative way of describing the account (which I happen to like) https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/in-search-of-a-flood-like-no-other https://everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/in-search-of-a-fl...
- hackernewds 5y agofwiw I agree with you too. It read like a kitchen recipe article that has the whole history of apples and grandma's cooking before the recipe steps. the author's regular readers might be interested in this though. to me, a reader sources from HN I wanted to get to the factual history of the event, than the author's background as well
- mistrial9 5y agoapparently, 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.
- bandibus 5y agoIt did. I know this, because I'm the author of that Twitter thread. :) And yes, I'm not a science writer (ex-archaeologist turned travel writer). But the enthusiasm, which is real, is what seemed to make it go viral on Twitter. I hope I stayed on the side of being engaging rather than shamelessly clickbaiting, but - yeah, slippery slope. Nevertheless, the whole research project is incredible, and I was lucky enough to have the lead scientist weigh in, in the comments. (The comments were spectacular and I'm very grateful for that.)
- wolverine876 5y agoEfforts like that to 'sell' science - by dumbing it down, using 'gonzo' presentation, etc. - signals that the author believes there is little intrinsic value in the science, little of actual interest. Like a bad tasting medicine, it must be consumed with sugar. There is an enormous amount of intrinsic value and highly engaging content in science. Scientists need to have the courage of their convictions, and express what they find so interesting and beautiful about it. I'm very interested, but when I anticipate such presentations I run: I expect they will displace the interesting stuff with the presentation, and/or it will distract from or obscure it, sometimes unbearably. I don't want to eat delicious food with spoons full of sugar.
- bandibus 5y agoNot true in this case! I'm the author, and I believe the exact opposite about science - that there's astonishing value in learning about the work being done right now, that it's easy to miss so much of it simply because of the amount of information we all consume, and that the scientific process has a lot to teach the world about putting aside ideas of "right" and "wrong" in favour of keeping an open mind and holding our opinions lightly. But also: I'm happy if I can just point anyone towards those doing the actual scientific work, because I'm just a middleman here. If someone thinks I'm an idiot but clicks through to the research itself - that's a win too.
- kibwen 5y agoThe 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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(xkcd) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_(xkcd) . Here's a site that lets you step through it one panel at a time: http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/ http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/ . Well worth a read.
- teddyh 5y agoI suggest: https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1190:_Time https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1190:_Time
- bandibus 5y agoYes! Still one of the best things on the internet, just incredible. It also inspired the Saga of the Exiles book series by Julian May. (It's presented as an act of terrorism by time travellers, to repel alien invaders.)
- kibwen 5y agoAh, I see that you mention this at the bottom :P
- themadturk 5y agoSo glad you mention the Julian May book. It was the first thing I thought of when I started reading your (excellent, highly readable) post!
- nabeards 5y agoReminds me of https://yearofslurm.com/ https://yearofslurm.com/ a year-long connected art piece.
- sdoering 5y agoI am still, after nine years reminded that it started on my birthday. It was a beautiful present by chance. I should watch it again. It was lovely. There are quite a few videos of it on YouTube [0]. [0]: https://youtu.be/VoV-jzwaw_Q https://youtu.be/VoV-jzwaw_Q
- User23 5y agoI like Manly Wade Wellman’s speculation in his Hok the Mighty stories that Atlantis was located in the giant valley.
- skrebbel 5y agoBuilt by who? There were no humans back then.
- cgio 5y agoAliens of course
- pmontra 5y agoYes, everybody have been knowing that from more than 40 years. And there were humans back then. They time travelled from not so many years in our future. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Pliocene_Exile https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saga_of_Pliocene_Exile
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eesmith 5y agoDon't worry, the Time Patrol, which has an site near Gibraltar Falls, will be there. https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781476780528/9781476780528___5.htm https://www.baen.com/Chapters/9781476780528/9781476780528___... (a Poul Anderson short story).
- skrebbel 5y agoFair enough
- whoopdedo 5y agoIt's commonly believed that the myth of Atlantis may have been inspired by the destruction of the Minoan city Akrotiri by a volcanic eruption and ensuing tsunami. [*] https://forbes5.pitt.edu/article/eruption-thera https://forbes5.pitt.edu/article/eruption-thera
- ggm 5y agoIf 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... How long would it take to reach "homeostasis"? there's already semi-stable thermohaline layers between the med and the atlantic. differential current flows depending on depth.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- welder 5y agoRemove that annoying sticky header with this js snippet pasted in your url bar: 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)()
- throwoutway 5y agoDo you have a tool that computes this for you?
- aendruk 5y agoOr unstick it with a uBlock Origin filter: substack.com##.main-menu-content:style(position: relative !important)
- tulert 5y agoBefore 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.
- Gibbon1 5y agoI read somewhere that adiabatic heating would result in temperatures of around 170 degF at the deepest.
- Shadonototra 5y agoi 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
- eesmith 5y agoThat makes no sense. Any asteroid big enough to move a continent would effectively destroy the world's biosphere. We know what asteroid impacts look like. None would do what you say. Only about a quarter of the Sahara is covered in sand. Why weren't the other parts covered in sand? What does "killed ancient Egypt civilization" mean? The Assyrian conquest ca. 663 BCE? And which South America civilizations? The Chavín? Wikipedia says the Jarabarriu period ended until ca. 250 BCE. That's a 400 year difference.
- Shadonototra 5y agoThe Assyrian came when the ancient egyptian civilization was already long gone I refer to the flooding theories dating from 4000+ BCE from all over the world Including https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_flood#Glacial_floods_in_North_America_(8,000_to_15,000_years_ago) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_flood#Glacial_floods_... I should note that it's just fantasized thoughts, i'm just dreaming
- eesmith 5y agoWhat "ancient egyptian civilization" do you refer to? 4000+ BCE predates the Early Dynastic Period, so for that postulated event to have occurred you must be referring to something earlier, during the prehistory of Egypt. The better reference is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Historicity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_myth#Historicity . When expressing a dream you understand to be non-realistic, please don't start "i always thought ...". Perhaps "I always fantasized ..."
- sam_goody 5y agoIf 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.
- srean 5y agoTalking about overcoming unsurmountable obstacles, I find the story of the Brahmaputra river an intriguing (and inspiring if used as a metaphor) opposite. The river predates the Himalayas that came up and blocked its path. Nevertheless it wore it down to find its way into the sea on the other side.
- EdwardDiego 5y agoThere's a few of those :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_gap https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_gap
- srean 5y agoThanks for teaching me the name
- euroderf 5y agoSounds like a high school class graduation project. Bring your own shovel.
- janmo 5y agoOnce things get in motion it can go very quickly. It must have looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDmoXkF-g9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDmoXkF-g9I Starting very small and then growing exponentially. 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.
- lqet 5y agoI 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ma0SVjMHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Ma0SVjMHA 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. Here is the cove it created: https://www.google.com/maps/@4.402039,100.5917748,1546m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/@4.402039,100.5917748,1546m/data...
- mkl 5y agoThat's the Malacca strait, thousands of km from the Pacific ocean. Pretty amazing video though!
- dmd 5y agoThat inflow was on the order of a few thousand cfm. The Gibraltar event was ~ 5 orders of magnitude more flow. So imagine 10,000 of those side by side.
- lqet 5y agoI think there are two possibilities: either the strait of Gibraltar was suddenly lowered by an earthquake and the atlantic immediately started to flow into the mediterranean over the entire 13 km (which would have look very different than the video), or the land barrier slowly eroded at some small location until a tipping point, and the water than quickly widened the hole in a few hours/days. In the latter case, I think it is reasonable to assume that it first looked somehow like in the video. But I still agree that is near to impossible to imagine the scale of the peak inflow.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoExactly. It's not like a dam breach where you have a constant and steep incline into deep water. You've got a taper up on one side and down on the other. So your initial breach is going to only have a small cross section. You get something like river rapids as a result. And then erosion quickly does its thing, but much less quickly than it does when water goes over the top of a dam because the much shallower grade means that the amount of material that needs to be moved to get a deeper breach increase more quickly than in the case of a dam. The video from Malaysia is water flowing into what was formerly a mine pit so (like a dam) the wall is going to be about as steep as the geology can support. Natural geology tends to create much more mild slopes.
- rbrtdrmpc- 5y agoHoly crap, so the Po river was ridiculously long
- 8bitsrule 5y agoGood (& lengthy) Earth-Science Reviews article (Feb 2020) on Zanclean here: [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012825219302521#s0020 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001282521...]