Roughly five and a half million years ago the Mediterranean dried up almost entirely, and when the Atlantic finally broke back through at Gibraltar it may have refilled the whole basin in only a few years.

Roughly five and a half million years ago the Mediterranean dried up almost entirely, and when the Atlantic finally broke back through at Gibraltar it may have refilled the whole basin in only a few years.

body.single-post h1.entry-title,body.single-post .entry-title{text-transform:none!important;} The Mediterranean looks permanent because human history is short. Rome, Alexandria, Athens, Carthage and Istanbul all belong to a sea that seems older than memory. But in geological time, the basin has a much stranger past: for part of the late Miocene, it was cut off from the Atlantic and drawn down by evaporation until large parts of it became salt fl…