Mediterranean Sea filled in less than two years: study | Hacker News Reader

Mediterranean Sea filled in less than two years: study

phys.org

149 pointscurtis60 comments

XKCD did a comic about this phenomenon a few years ago. The story is set in the far future when the Med has dried up again, and the next flood that refills it is imminent. http://blog.xkcd.com/2013/07/29/1190-time/

"video": http://geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190/

"Oh noes, something has gone wrong!"

What's special about the "Special" frames, in particular "Debated" frames?

According to the readme - https://github.com/deplicator/xkcdTime_atyourownpace/blob/ma...

> Special frames are selected by popular vote. The vote calculation is done automaticly, but new special frames won't show up right away (about a 10 minute delay). For a frame to attain special status it must receive a certain number of votes, and it must have a higher number of votes for it than against it. The exact numbers for this are still being determined.

> Debated Frames are frames that have recieved a number of both yes and no votes.

Appreciated.

The special frames are ones where people have voted that it demands extra attention (e.g. text to read) that wouldn't be possible at multiple FPS. Debated just appears to be that there are significant yes votes, but insufficient to make it special.

And even won a Hugo award for it!

Entirely offtopic, but how is it that the xkcd blog suffers from such a terrible spam comment problem?

Its a test, to measure how intelligent the spambots are getting.

  See https://xkcd.com/810/

What's the best way to 'read' that xkcd storyline?

WildwoodClaire's video on the Messinian Salinity Crisis gives an excellent backround on the paleogeology of the Mediterranean basin, particularly as expressed through salt deposits up to 3500 meters thick, but also with considerable evidence of ancient channels both in the regions surrounding the Mediterranean (as at the Aswan High Dam) and underneath the existing sea.

Her enthusiasm is also infectious.

https://youtu.be/U5qTQpws5H0

There is a similar theory about the Black Sea: the Black Sea deluge hypothesis [1].

From Wikipedia:

The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized catastrophic rise in the level of the Black Sea circa 5600 BC from waters from the Mediterranean Sea breaching a sill in the Bosphorus strait.

(This one, if true, is pretty interesting because it occurred within fairly recent human history.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

This has been theorized to be the origin of Great Flood myths, both Biblical and those of earlier cultures.

The embellishing is pretty amazing, and added the bit about it going down again. Maybe if we repent hard enough we can get the sea level lower?

If we drink hard enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Atgar%C3%B0a-Loki

Is there a contemporary basin ripe for a catastrophic flood from the sea in the event of an earthquake?

New Orleans, many areas of China (see 1931 China Floods), areas along the Ganges Delta, also look at the Special Flood Hazard Areas assigned in the US.

Netherlands.

Death Valley could flood if there was some way for sea water to get to it. If the climate changed and it started to rain there often, it could also make a massive inland freshwater lake.

There once was many lakes in this region:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Pleistoc...

It does occasionally get standing water during winter/spring rainstorms. I remember hearing about someone windsurfing there in 2005.

>freshwater lake

Death Valley has no outlets (is endorheic), so it would be a salt water lake (at least after all the surface salt had time to dissolve).

Nothing the size of the Med, of course. There are several major below-sealevel basins in Northern Africa. The most significant is probably the Qattara Depression[1], which probably won't ever naturally flood, but is the target of many plans to flood it intentionally for power production and improvements in local climate.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression

Vaguely related is the Salton Sea in southern California. It's been a large lake in the geological past, but it most recently filled in due to some bad irrigation planning in 1905. It filled up in about 2 years.

The Mosul Dam holds back a lake which would flood Baghdad in a matter of hours if damaged by earthquake or bombings.

If you like Sci-Fi, spoiler alert but Julian May's Pliocene Saga is set around this event.

Just don't read too far into the series. The first four books are pretty good, but the further on it goes...

Good to know. I read the original series about 20 years ago and was recently thinking of catching up on the rest of it.

The Gandalara books by Randall Garrett as well.

>"We do not envisage a waterfall, as is often represented: instead the geophysical data suggests a huge ramp, several kilometres wide, descending from the Atlantic to the dry Mediterranean...," the scientists said.

Can anyone help me get a mental image of this?

Imagine a big ass river. Pretty much the same concept, but in reverse.

Something like this on a much, much larger scale.

https://youtu.be/_yCnQuILmsM?t=1m19s

> ""We also know that the velocity of the water flow must have been more than 300 kilometres an hour."

I'm not sure how to visualize this.

I feel like the friction against the air would be enough to cause tornadoes.

A snow avalanche is probably the closest thing you can see today.

Try to find one where it hits trees and see what it does to them, otherwise it's hard to really see the scale and force.

It is an incredible thing to think about!

There's a few simulations around: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xQeEgPhSfI

is that the flood the bible refers too?

No, this happened about 5.6 million years ago, according to the study. That's well before the advent of the homo sapien or any prehistoric ancestors developing a language complex enough to tell such a story.

Fwiw, there are more recent large floods that serve as possible inspiration for the flood stories you can find in any major religion.

For example:

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/evidence-for-a-...

A lot of the older books of the bible were collected from Mesopotamian mythology. Based on the stories it's likely something big really did happen, but no one is quite sure what.

I've always been fascinated by the Scottish Tsunami/Storegga Slide of ~6000BC, which was about 70ft high at the coast and ran some 50 miles inland.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide

I mean, Mesopotamia was flooding quite frequently. I don't think much further inspiration is necessary.

I thought the world wasn't 5 million years old according to the bible.

A common myth. The bible doesn't say the world was created in 6 days, but in 6 'yoms'. A yom in Hebrew means 'a defined period of time'. Like an epoch, or a year, a day or a minute etc.

The bible was translated into English in the middle ages.

Wikipedia has a definition as 'A long, but finite span of time', among others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom

This is all great info, thanks, but the flood came well after the world creation, didn't it?

Actually at the first reading it occurred to me, too, that the fact became the base of the flood legend, but it happened before Australopithecus...

> but the flood came well after the world creation, didn't it?

It's not that simple. Before the flood human lifetimes are listed as up to 969 years. After the flood human lifetimes are same as modern ones.

The flood was not just water on the earth, it was a total transformation of the earth and its inhabitants.

Did the clock they used to define "year" change? It's not known.

It's interesting that the similar "stretch of lifetime" is seen in Japanese ancient document (Kojiki), and probably in other cultures, too. Those ancient tales were inherited orally before recorded. Could it be that the storytellers tend to exaggerate? Or maybe counting the number of years wasn't that objective but had more subjective significance?

There is a theory that the age of Biblical patriarchs were originally recorded in months (969 months = 80 years and 9 months, which is quite reasonable) and somehow got mistranslated into years sometime later. This, however, doesn't quite work with Enoch who is said to have had a son at age 65.

So, maybe he had been married very young to an older female and had a, for him at the age of 5 a half years surprising, pregnancy attributed to him. His age of 365 days is still rather symbolic. His father's 81 years at that time are rather a lot. I'm not even sure that kind of arranged marriage was common. He was said to be living amongst sinners, anyhow, while his father was said to have had many children. The Grandfather of the family would have reached fatherhood at the same 65 (yoms, then), so, whatever.

Or maybe they were just stories that were taken at face value, as they have been for hundreds of years.

I don't know, if yoms has a different meaning, maybe father has, too.

I propose, children would be given responsibilities early on, they had to start soon. So, maybe being a father at figure 65 months means teaching a brother or cousin or other newborn and leaving the adults care for the food. They would form trust for one another while the resentment from biological parents towards their children, as shown with gods fury over adam and eve, would be mutual. "Alter" (older) in german can mean big brother, or father, but generally any subjectively old one.

Of course I mainly agree to the story aspect, but I don't know any other mysticism about the mentioned figures.

It's not as clear cut as that. The Hebrew word used for a "day" in Genesis 1 can also mean an extended period of time.

The Zanclean flood seems to have occured 5.3 million years ago, while the genus Homo has emerged 2.5 million years ago. Another way to look at it is that the first human was closer to witnessing Lee Sedol's win against AlphaGo than it was to seeing that flood.

Humans started developing their first language around 1.8 million years ago. Unless apes were able to somehow express the idea of a flood before having a language, it seems unlikely.

>Lee Sedol's win against AlphaGo

Haha, yes. A truly epoch-defining event.

Not sure why you are being down-voted, as it is a fair question. But it was too long ago to be a part of human memory. Perhaps the Black Sea deluge though...

Maybe, however we have recent flooding events that are almost biblical. There are the recent in my lifetime floods in the Mississippi valley 1993 and 2011. Not to mention the 1927 flood. Ohio River flood of 1937 which I think is mythologized in the Johnny Cash song 5ft high and rising.

In the Great Flood of 1862 the California Central Valley flooded, 6000 square miles, some of which was still under water 6 months later.

While I suspect such floods don't occur in the Euphrates and Tigris basins now, 5000 years ago when the climate was wetter, perhaps such floods similar to the Great Flood of 1862 did occur every few hundred years.

Wouldn't it be interesting if ancient historians found evidence of the flood and it made its way into mythology? "Science inspires religion."

you might want to read this: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160118-the-atlantis-style-m...

It reminds me of the Red Sea Dam idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sea_Dam

[2009]

Mesopotamia was flooding quite frequently.

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