Was the Mediterranean once a desert? Messinian Salinity Crisis: 50 years of controversy and recent advances from a modelling perspective

Abstract

About 5.5 million years ago the Mediterranean Sea underwent a dramatic hydrological, environmental and biological crisis, as its connection to the global ocean and water supply was disrupted. This Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC) left a salt deposit of thousands of cubic kilometers on the basin floor, and caused deep incision of rivers on its margins as they adjusted to a lowered water level. This makes it one of the largest salt deposits on earth, and by far the youngest, least affected by subsequent tectonic events.

After 50 years of scientific effort by geologists, geochemists, geophysicists and others some of the large controversies surrounding the MSC remain unresolved. In this talk I will discuss the advances in MSC research since its discovery during the first oceanic drilling campaign in the Mediterranean in 1970, and illustrate how the vast amount of data gathered in these efforts now allow us to use modelling to decipher some of its mysteries.