Talk:Messinian salinity crisis

message: There's a new theory for salt formation . This theory is in development by a research group headed by Martin Hovland called "Hydrothermal salt theory", of salt formation was proposed recently. Salt rocks also form by replacement of carbonate rocks by salts. This new theory of salt deposition is related to deep origin where supercritical water loss molecular polarity and capacity of dissolution of salts and then salt from brines are deposited by hydrothermal processes in deep water, carried by non-polar water, mainly during early opening ocean after processes of rift systems. Salt rocks is frequently associated with volcanism. Based on Hydrothermal Salt, it's not necessary dry Mediterranean Sea to form salt deposits.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 186.205.173.212 (talk) 01:39, 12 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Hydrothermal Salt

message: Does anyone have any further information about its effect upon the Black Sea? I recently read a book by David Gibbins (Called "Atlantis") in which he proposes that the Black sea would have had a different shoreline a lower level with it being isolated by the Bosporous. Just wondered if there was any evidence of this and whether it would make a useful addition to this page?
:The Black Sea doesn't get most of its water from the Mediterranean, and the closing off and reopening of the Bosphorus happened most recently thousands of years ago (not millions, as with the Strait of Gibraltar). AnonMoos 07:35, 9 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Effects on Black Sea

message: I'd just like to point out for the interested reader that there are numerous factual errors in this article.  These are not really substantial to the casual reader though.  It is now estimated that sealevel only dropped 1500 m , though some articles suggest 2000 m.  Also, DSDP leg 13 did not recover evaporites beyond a small piece of halite.  This evidence came later.  Hopefully I will be able to come back and modify the article soon, but there are quite a few facts that I would need to verify that are currently in this article. --129.173.105.28 15:57, 14 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Factual errors

message: Is there any reason why this is at Messinian Salinity Crisis rather than Messinian salinity crisis? Neither of the quoted references uses capital letters. --OpenToppedBus - Talk to the driver 12:17, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I decided to be bold and just move it. --OpenToppedBus - Talk to the driver 09:52, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Capitalisation

message: This is extremely interesting.  Thanks to those who took the time to create this article.  Well done...wish they taught more of this stuff in school! CoachMcGuirk 20:35, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Fascinating

message: *It was not clear from the article when the basin filled back up again. 06:46, 15 January 2007 User:24.6.103.21
*Answer inserted. Anthony Appleyard 07:36, 15 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: When did it fill back up?

message: I have chosen to withdraw the conjecture that evaporation from the Mediterranean has a significant effect upon the extent of the Sahara in central (latitudinal) Africa. Any effect would have been subtle, and the the area has had at most a slight influence upon human history. I have chosen instead to suggest that pre-modern civilizations in the Mediterranean basin would have been far different even had they existed. Ancient Egypt would have had a deep hot canyon that could have pushed human habitability beyond its capacity. All parts of the eastern Mediterranean would have been drier and with harsher extremes of temperature, and the economic basis of any intellectual or religious life would not have existed, and the absence of any sea to allow access over a wide area of disparate lands would have left all of them, especially the islands of the region, extremely isolated instead of connected. Paul from Michigan 03:34, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Source citations needed.  (SEWilco 06:20, 6 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sahara expansion 

message: I use Arnold Toynbee's model of civilizations to connect physical geography to connect large-scale history to environmental shaping of human activity. All that I can do is to paraphrase Toynbee's voluminous A Study of History, a work not yet in the public domain. Toynbee suggests as a rule that civilization arises most readily at an optimal level of challenge and reward to those who live in an area. The Mediterranean basin to this day provides adequate foodstuffs in good variety to large populations, as it did in antiquity, but not without requiring some adjustments to circumstances. Farming is possible if one adjusts to the summer droughts of the region, which means that people must store enough foodstuffs to last through a long dry summer. (Egypt has the opposite situation; its floods occur in summer and they allow food production). Fishing is possible as a supplement, but the Mediterranean Sea has relatively sparse fishing, so fish must be a supplement.  Trees are large but scattered, and enough variety of trees exist to allow the addition of nutritious fruits and nuts to a diet; they rarely form dense forests that must be cleared for agriculture. Ranching is possible, in contrast to nomadic herding that characterises steppes and the milder deserts; ranching requires law and record-keeping.  The Mediterranean world requires trade, seafaring, record keeping, and law, clear characteristics of civilization. Literacy becomes a necessity, at least among elites.
Civilization could appear elsewhere in ancient times (east Asia and South Asia, the Yucatan Peninsula, the highlands of Mexico and Peru, Persia, and the Tigris-Euphrates valley with little or no influence from Mediterranean civilizations, but not in any world of large enclosed waterways. The Black Sea area was an adjunct to the civilizations of the Mediterranean region, and the Caspian Sea abuts steppes to the north and west and harsh desert to the east, and the Elburz Mountains cut it off from Persia. If one ignores the terrain and the climate, the Baltic Sea looks much like the Mediterranean -- but the terrain is relatively homogeneous, and until the Middle Ages it was surrounded by dense forests that had to be cleared if agriculture was to occur. Civilization appeared in the Baltic region only during the Middle Ages when large-scale forest-cutting became possible, and without doubt under the influence of Mediterranean cultures. The Great Lakes of North America (note what I call myself) also have some superficial similarity to the Mediterranean region as large bodies of water, but as in the Baltic basin the terrain is remarkably uniform.  The region was populated by hunter-gatherers until modern times, when people whose culture clearly derived from Mediterranean civilizations (the Dutch, French, and English) began to clear dense forests for farmland and started exploiting the lakes as inland seas.
Toynbee suggests that conditions can soft enough for hunter-gatherers to persist indefinitely, as in the African  "Great Lakes" region in which temperatures are uniform and foodstuffs are plentiful for small populations. 
To be sure, the highest material and intellectual achievements reflect the refined geniuses of the likes of Euclid -- but some environments make such a person irrelevant despite his potential. I can see Euclid as one that conditions made necessary (he was as much a master of logic as of mathematics), but someone who would have been irrelevant in most places. If you are to discuss classical Greece, one recognizes that trade and foodstuff storage made record-keeping and architecture necessary, and that legal disputes and political debates that required shrewd argumentation were best made by those who had well honed their skills in formal logic before becoming lawyers and politicians, something that Euclid's Elements did very well.
Intellectual greatness as a rule requires extreme refinement of technique -- but the technique as a rule requires an economic foundation. No marble -- no Michelangelo. No patrons (for the lack of economic surpluses) -- no Michelangelo. No heritage of technique -- no Michelangelo. One can say much the same of Isaac Newton and Johann Sebastian Bach.  
If the Mediterranean Sea basin had continued to be blocked off from Atlantic waters to this day, then not only would the physical world be wildly different to now, but so would the intellectual world. The classical civilizations from Egypt to Greece, Rome, and Carthage would ever have existed. Even if the ice sheets had retreated and opened the  lands of northern Europe to human settlement (a dessicated Mediterranean might have made the Ice Age more severe), civilization would have formed later than otherwise in the lands around the Baltic and North Seas; Irish, English, German, Scandinavian, Polish, and Russian civilization owe much to Rome and Greece. Perhaps the Chinese and Japanese would have reached the New World instead of Europeans -- but not with any heritage of Athenian or Icelandic democracy. Perhaps the Aztecs would have successfully expanded their civilization into the temperate regions of North America... and the area around the southwestern shore of Lake Michigan would look far different from the Chicago and Milwaukee that we know, and with far-different institutions. Even the Italian Renaissance might not have occurred, as there would have been no ancient culture to exploit. 
In religion? Monotheism appeared for a short time in Egypt and took deep root in Judea. Monotheism requires some intellectual sophistication, something unlikely to arise in the Levant. The absence of Abraham implies neither Moses, Jesus, nor Mohammed. 
Maybe we would have some fusion of Zoroastrianism and Buddhism  throughout the world. Who knows?   
If anything, the responsibility to prove that the world would be much the same lies upon anyone who seeks to claim that the world, materially and intellectually, would be much the same except in the areas around the Mediterranean Sea. I have my doubts that we would be having this discussion if the Mediterranean basin were permanently emptied of water; the knowledge and technology would probably not exist.
To be sure, Wikipedia has an invariable bias toward humanity for the simple reason that only members of Homo sapiens make contributions. 
It also has a bias toward literate, civilized persons because any remaining pre-literary and pre-technological persons make no contributions. That said, I prefer humanity to whatever low life might thrive in a saline pressure cooker utterly unsuited to humanity. --Paul from Michigan 19:00, 10 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: yikes, that was a rant :) the best thing to do in a situation like this is to either question speculative statements, demand a source, or even remove them completely. 131.111.8.97 16:01, 12 February 2007 (UTC)

text: I use convection and circulation around a candle as a model for the hot Mediterranean desert causing a plume of upward air flow which draws in air across all the surrounding continents, producing rain forests all around it.  Explorers from the Inca empire would have lined the Sahara rain forest cliff tops with stepped stone pyramids.  (SEWilco 20:12, 12 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The World Turn'd Upside Down 

message: There presently is a gap of about 40 years (1920-1961) in the discovery of clues of the crisis.  I think I still have one source on the topic which I'll check again.  (SEWilco 18:44, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  40 year gap 

message: As much as I like his novels, I think it is inappropriate that this article should have an entire (lengthy) paragraph almost solely devoted to speculations on the part of H.G. Wells before even starting to treat the subject itself. Wells was not a scientist and his thoughts on this phenomenon are indeed speculative, and as such they lack relevancy. This way we could include entire sections of similar speculative thought by lay individuals about natural phenomena in lots of other articles, which we don't. The connection with the actual Messinian Salinity Crisis is weak; Wells speculates about an event which he thought might have taken place during the last Ice Age (not the Miocene), when nothing happened that may come close to a drying up of the Mediterranean, and he thought the Mediterranean plains would have been fertile, which they obviously weren't. In my opinion, Wells' views, if they are to be mentioned, should be much less prominently featured than they are now. Iblardi 19:41, 6 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It's a non-fiction history book, which is why I used phrases such as "thought" and "believed".  He shows that there was awareness that the basin might have dried up, and at least one clue had been noticed before 1961.  (SEWilco 01:50, 7 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  H.G. Wells 

message: On serveral places in the article it is said that the Gibraltar strait is now permanently open. Given evidence that the Mediterranean has dried up several times in the past, is it not realistic to think it will happen again? Drhex 21:23, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Possibly, but an open Strait of Gibraltar has been present for the last 5.odd million years, which can count as "permanent". The Messinian Crisis was only of short duration compared to that time span. Iblardi 21:45, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Check out Pangaea Ultima. I know it's only hypothetical, as it is a projected future, but is most likely that Gibralter will close off again. It is not contested that Africa is moving north into Europe. There's an illustration at . Of course, if the sea levels rise much, it may be a moot point.  samwaltz 23:10, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, given the general pattern of plate tectonics in that region it is more than likely that it will happen again. Go ahead and mention it. "Permanently" in this context is only relative of course, i.e. counting from ~5 million years ago up to our present day. Iblardi 10:35, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gibraltar strait "permanently" open? 

message: I wonder about the temperature and pressure at the lowest bottom of the dried-up Mediterranean basin.  Can anyone calculate it?  I assume an “altitude” similar to the deepest places in the Mediterranean Sea today.  Also, global temperatures where higher 5 – 6 million years ago.  So present-day Spain, Portugal and Morocco might have been tropical.  Could liquid water exist on the bottom of the dried-up abyssal plain?  Even if it could temperatures might have been above 150°C.  If so the area would have been lifeless since no known cellular mechanisms would work properly at such temperatures.  In other words not even the hardiest of heat-loving bacteria would had survived.
2007-12-08  Lena Synnerholm, Märsta, Sweden.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.229.19.152 (talk) 17:33, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It wouldnt be that hot.  The most you could hope for would be about 70°C in the summer, with 80°C on some very extraordinarily hot days.  And the fact that the Earth was warmer then would have little effect, because the tropics dont usually warm as much when that happens (with some exceptions, e.g. the Permio-Trassic extinction event.)  I am going to write in this article soon, but all I will say is that the answer is unknown.  <FONT COLOR="#800000"><B>Soap</B></FONT> Talk/Contributions 19:33, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

text: the higher pressure the more likely water is liquid (just high school physics:). But i like a section about climate condition during time 5 Mya when the hot climate was essential to human evolution. One of theory is that the extreme hot temperature was critical to our prehistory. On the beaches of drying sea there should be a lot of well preserved (salted) herrings or other kind of fish. The monkey may get reason to go deep in the hot zone to become human. TN 76.16.176.166 (talk) 02:20, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

text: I think youve got upslope and downslope winds the wrong way around. A downslope wind obeys the adiabatic equations perfectly, but an upslope will only do so until it reaches 100% saturation.  Therefore, any winds descending into the dry seabed will indeed warm up at a very high rate. —Soap— 20:44, 5 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pressure and temperature at the dried-up abyssal plain 

message: I don't see that this section refers to the Messinian salinity crisis at all - hence my removal of it.  Certainly none of the works refer to the Messinian period. A list of works of fiction about the Mediterranean sea has any place in an encyclopaedia article about a specific event at a specific time.  At worst, the map leads to great confusion, suggesting at first blush that the crisis  may have occurred alongside neolithic man. The Dinosaur article does not have an extensive list of books about cavemen eating dinosaurs, etc.
If the material must remain, it could be reduced to a passing comment that "some people have written about the Med drying out", and if absolutely necessary an article "Fictional works about the desiccation of the Mediterranean sea" could be created. But no long list please.
Verisimilus T 17:08, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, it does seem to have acquired a lot of fluff which is not particularly relevant nor likely to be useful in the rest of the article.  I agree with its removal.  -- SEWilco (talk) 20:17, 4 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  "In Popular culture" 

message: This is probably a bit off-topic, but Re: the 'Replenishment' section, about the time when the Strait of Gibraltar was ultimately breached, and the Atlantic poured in through a relatively small gap - see the video of the 1993 Pantai Remis landslide when the sea broke through a narrow land barrier between an open cast tin mine (right next to the sea - yes, really) to get an idea of what this might have been like (on a somewhat smaller scale ...)  Roisterdoister (talk) 11:44, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Atlantic pouring in through the breach

message: *I don't understand geology that well, and maybe someone who does can answer a question.  If the Strait of Gibraltar closed off, and the Mediterranean dropped some thousands of feet, what would keep the Suez isthmus from eroding to the point that a connection with the Red Sea opened up?  AFAIK the land between the Red Sea and Mediterranean isn't more than 30 feet high -- the Suez Canal was built without any locks.  It seems to me that, if there were a huge steep drop down from the current coast of Africa to the much lower Med. Sea, rain falling would quickly erode deep channels all along the coast (and the rain shadow effect would mean more rain than currently), and I can easily imagine one of those channels expanding to the point that it cut across the Suez isthmus. (Perhaps the isthmus was much higher then, or the Red Sea itself was blocked?) Benwing (talk) 03:54, 1 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  the Suez canal? 

message: The dramatic dry period, 6.0 to 5.3 Mya, closely coincides, with the evolutionary split, between forest-dwelling Chimpanzees, and savanna-dwelling proto-humans.  Could there be some kind of closer connection ? 66.235.26.150 (talk) 22:04, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Coincidence of timing

message: James Hutton, speculating about the origin of salt deposits, wrote in his 'THEORY of the EARTH; or an INVESTIGATION of the Laws observable in the Composition, Dissolution, and Restoration of Land upon the Globe' that "THE formation of salt at the bottom of the sea, without the assistance of subterranean fire, is not a thing unsupposable, as at first sight it might be. Let us but suppose a rock place across the gut of Gibraltar, (a case nowise unnatural), and the bottom of the Mediterranean would be certainly filled with salt, because the evaporation from the surface of that sea exceeds the measure of its supply" . I'm not sure that this has any place in the article, but it's quite a thought experiment for 1785. Mikenorton (talk) 22:37, 24 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Hutton's observation

message: :"Changes in climate must almost certainly be invoked to explain the periodic nature of the events. They occur during cool periods of Milankovic cycles, when less solar energy reached the Earth. This led to less evaporation of the North Atlantic, hence less rainfall over the Mediterranean. This would have starved the basin of water supply from rivers and allowed its desiccation.
:Contrary to many people's instincts, there is now a scientific consensus that global sea level fluctuations cannot have been the major cause, although it may have played a role. The lack of ice caps at the time means there was no realistic mechanism to cause significant changes in sea level - there was nowhere for the water to go, and the morphology of ocean basins cannot change on such a short timescale.[citation needed]..."
-- These last two paragraphs (already affixed with a cite tag) ought be nuked for failing simple tests of logic. Given a setting in which the Strait of Gibraltar is open (however shallow, but open), a lowering on either side would result in increased flow and resultant erosion (continually keeping the channel open). Were the climate of the Med arid to the point of the sea level declining greatly, even the least active trickle from the Atlantic would quickly back-build erosively, resulting in a canyon and re-filled Mediterranean.
In the absence of any hard evidence, the most logical theory is one in which uplift and closure of the Strait occurred during a local climatic regime which was wet enough (i.e., wetter than at present) that the Mediterranean's fresh-water input almost exactly matched its evaporation (i.e., the level of the sea relative to the Atlantic would neither quickly fall nor rise in the event of damming). Only after the dam is well established (laterally thick) could the sea level drop without the dam almost immediately collapsing or eroding.
The following sentences: "They occur during cool periods of Milankovic cycles, when less solar energy reached the Earth. This led to less evaporation of the North Atlantic, hence less rainfall over the Mediterranean" ...are climatologically specious. First, colder climates result in a lower latitude orientation of the jet streams as bolstered Arctic airmasses invade farther south, i.e., increased wind and storminess in the temperate zones (in other words, more rain in the Mediterranean region, supporting my thesis above). Secondly, and in confirmation, the sea region as well as Saharan Africa were significantly wetter during the most recent advances of the Quaternary glaciations when the mid-latitude Westerlies descended into the region, dislodging the "Saharan high" (a permanent fixture today) responsible for desertification.--66.41.95.121 (talk) 05:12, 15 August 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Illogical "Causes" 

message: Since there were no humans around during this "crisis", why is it called a crisis? Seems to be more of a event than a crisis.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.241.37.187 (talk) 22:48, 18 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Crisis

message: I propose removing the following from the first sentence: ", also referred to as the Messinian Event, and in its latest stage as the Lago Mare event, ". Messinian Event is not frequently used, and Lago-Mare refers to only a part of the period. Gaianauta (talk) 12:49, 27 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd go ahead with the latter. But with the former, maybe say "infrequently referred to as Messinian Event." If by not frequently, you mean you haven't heard it in 20 years, then it doesn't matter I suppose. Just be bold. I think maybe 5 people watch this article. SkepticalRaptor (talk) 19:46, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

text: I'd been meaning to reply - I've seen "Messinian event" used quite often, although less than the "Messinian salinity crisis". Looking on Google Scholar and Google Books gives plenty of examples , . I would keep it as an alternative. Mikenorton (talk) 20:31, 31 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Header

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Messinian salinity crisis. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20080912012236/http://www.mountainecology.org/IBEX3/pdf/Art_Capitolo1/note_taxonomy_pleistocene.pdf to http://www.mountainecology.org/IBEX3/pdf/Art_Capitolo1/note_taxonomy_pleistocene.pdf
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 23:28, 8 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 5 external links on Messinian salinity crisis. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100523081426/http://www.geo.arizona.edu/geo2xx/geo212.034/Lect17.html to http://www.geo.arizona.edu/geo2xx/geo212.034/Lect17.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150110064509/http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/37/2/167.abstract to http://geology.gsapubs.org/content/37/2/167.abstract
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20120121052846/http://160.78.38.2/VM_file/PDF/Roveri_2008_Stratigraphy.pdf to http://160.78.38.2/VM_file/PDF/Roveri_2008_Stratigraphy.pdf
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20100523081426/http://www.geo.arizona.edu/geo2xx/geo212.034/Lect17.html to http://www.geo.arizona.edu/geo2xx/geo212.034/Lect17.html
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090302224055/http://www.messinianonline.it/ to http://www.messinianonline.it/
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 22:47, 24 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified (January 2018)