The largest known flood in geological time took anywhere from 2 years to 16 years to fill up the Mediterranean Sea. While it didn’t fill up the area fast, the water was powerful and hit some areas at speeds of 67 miles per hour — unleashing a wall of destruction that dug out canyons, shaped future islands and wiped out more than 95 percent of known marine species at the time.
“What makes this event extraordinary is it is the largest flood that we know that ever happened in Earth’s history,” says Aaron Micallef, a marine geoscientist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, a nonprofit oceanography center. “It was perhaps the most dramatic even that our planet witnessed since 65 million years ago when the meteor hit Mexico’s Yucatan and led, among other things, to the demise of the dinosaurs.”
Scientists have argued some time over that the Mediterranean experienced ...
