The Mediterranean dried out almost completely about 5.6 million years ago and sat as a salt desert for hundreds of thousands of years, until the Atlantic broke back through at Gibraltar and refilled the entire basin in a flood that may have taken as little as two years

The Mediterranean dried out almost completely about 5.6 million years ago and sat as a salt desert for hundreds of thousands of years, until the Atlantic broke back through at Gibraltar and refilled the entire basin in a flood that may have taken as little as two years

Stand on the floor of the Mediterranean 5.6 million years ago and the map of southern Europe would become almost unrecognisable. Sicily and Malta would be high ground. The continental shelves around Spain, France, Italy and North Africa would be exposed. Rivers reaching the basin would not meet the sea at their present mouths. They would continue across the former seabed and, in the deepest-drawdown reconstruction, descend through canyons toward…