- [i] 5.33 million years ago > [!quote] [In Search of a Flood Like No Other](https:/everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/in-search-of-a-flood-like-no-other?s=r) > > - [!] I had people speculating that this might be the source of all the flood myths of world history, including Atlantis, and also the one Noah escaped with his Ark. (This seems…unlikely, since modern humans wouldn’t appear for millions of years and for those stories to survive, they would have to be transmitted between the different species of our distant hominin ancestors - which were still living in Kenya at this time. Let’s just say this is the kind of stretch you won’t currently see any reputable scientist making, probably for good reason.) > > the Messinian Salinity Crisis, named after the geological age it took place in. In some presumed tectonic upheaval, the sea floor of what’s now the Strait of Gibraltar was thrust upwards, forming a bridge that cut the Mediterranean off from the Atlantic, its main replenishing source of water…and the Med started drying out.  > > After some amount of time - certainly much than all recorded human history, probably even longer than the 300,000 years that anatomically modern humans have existed on Earth - the bowl of the Mediterranean was a deep, empty desert, save for a few huge, super-salty lakes of unknown size. (There’s fossil evidence that suggests the presence of marine life during this time, so the Med is unlikely to have completely dried out.) > > An enormous salty dryness, up to 900 miles across, with sloping cliffs over a mile deep - shallower in the west of the Mediterranean bowl where the seabed is former of continental crust, much deeper in the east (and at its extreme eastern end, an incredible “[Egyptian Grand Canyon](https://thenaturalhistorian.com/2019/05/28/the-lost-grand-canyon-of-egypt-another-monument-to-an-ancient-earth/),” formed from the foundations of the Nile)…  > > And at its Western end, a plug - a strip of land just a few miles wide - with the force of the whole Atlantic behind it. > > Malta Escarpment - a steep, now-underwater cliff running north-south that descends as far as 3km to reach the eastern Mediterreanean sea floor. There is no modern parallel for the Malta Escarpment waterfall, either in height, in speed or in sheer unbridled violence. > > During this flooding event, the water-level in the eastern Mediterranean was rising by ten metres a day.