Mega-Alluvione Zancleana, a cataclysm has shaped the Mediterranean 5 million years ago

An international team of scholars, including researchers from the Ingv and the University of Catania, has identified the traces of a mega-insulation in Sicily. By focusing on an area between Syracuse and Ragusa, the researchers analyzed the hills and furrows in the landscape, discovering that their shape is compatible with the action of a turbulent water flow of gigantic proportions. This is what emerges from a new study conducted by an international team of scholars, recently published in the scientific journal “Communications Earth & Environment” Of ‘Nature‘to which they took part – among others – the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Ingv) and the University of Catania.

About 5 million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea was the protagonist of an unprecedented geological event: the Mega-Alluvione Zancleana. A cataclysm of unimaginable proportions, an anomalous gigantic wave that in a few years filled the Mediterranean basin again, dried up following the salinity crisis of the Messinian.

Between 5.97 and 5.33 million years ago, the area of ​​the Strait of Gibraltar rose, isolating the Mediterranean from the Atlantic Ocean. The sea nostrum turned into an immense salted desert expanse, with hypersaline basins where huge quantities of salt and plaster accumulated.

For over 50 years, scientists have wondered how the Mediterranean returned to being a sea. Some supported a slow filling, others a catastrophic event. Recent studies, based on hydrological modeling, had hypothesized that the filling had occurred quickly, in a few years, due to the collapse of the Isto of Gibraltar. But concrete tests were missing.

The Mega-Alluvione Zancleana was a global event, a cataclysm that has changed the face of the Mediterranean forever. The research, supported by realistic numerical modeling, provides the visible and most convincing test of this mega-infection, the largest hypothesized on our planet.

The stratigraphic analyzes made it possible to reconstruct the landscape before the flood: a low sea bay with limestone sediments, chalks and salts. The lowering of the sea level had brought part of this area to emerge, which was then flooded by the mass of water from the western Mediterranean. The strength of water and debris has remodeled the landscape, digging deep furrows and creating the “Canyon di Noto”.

The area analyzed in Sicily It could become a site of world interest for catastrophic flood scholars an increasingly current theme due to climate change and the dissolution of the ice. Understanding these events of the past is essential to prevent and manage the risks of future floods, which could put millions of people in different regions of the world at risk.