Talk:Zanclean flood

Sea level rise rate needs a change in the article

There's a sentence in the article which needs changing. The sentence in the intro is "Sea level rise in the basin may have reached rates at times greater than ten metres per day (thirty feet per day)." However, in reference 10 ("Sedimentary record of pre-quaternary tsunamis..") it lists the number as 10 meters/week. I haven't read all the papers yet, but that seems like a problem.

Optimally someone would update the units and add the reference, but I'm not much of a wikipedia editor so I couldn't figure out how to do either thing! So this is a placeholder in case my best intentions to come back and figure out how to fix this don't pan out. Maronnax (talk) 17:01, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Apparently this source says ten meters/day. Dunno why the factor 7 discrepancy. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 18:02, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Interesting! A little glancing and (no surprise) this all comes from modeling outputs. My take is that newer models came out (the 10m/week came from a paper published a couple years after the first reference) and the numbers got updated and some people started using them. For reference, the update seems to have originated in "Messinian salinity crisis regulated by competing tectonics and erosion at the Gibraltar Arc" by Garcia-Castellanos & A. Villasen, Nature, 2011. Maronnax (talk) 18:38, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Quick napkin calculation. Max depth of the med is 5267m. Mean is 1500m. If we assume this happens over 3 years the first spot would have filled at 35m/week==5m/day and I could believe that at some point it could have peaked as high as 10m/day. 1500m/150weeks = 10m/week for the average spot in the med. I'm guessing this is the discrepancy. I'm going to read some more and see if this works out. Will possibly look to clarify that sentence (e.g. "average of 1.5m/day with a maximum of 10m/day in places) although I need to understand some dynamics I don't just yet before I propose something. Maronnax (talk) 18:55, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Note though that we need to be careful with this kind of counting, per WP:CALC and WP:OR. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 20:39, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Novel view?

Is this view plausible enough to include? It sounds a bit like these "everyone so far was wrong" papers that I am always uncertain about. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 12:59, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

As a review article in a leading peer-reviewed journal, I think it is worth including. I am not sure how novel it is. The full desiccation is often treated as a fact, but the background section of our article discusses similar views. Dudley Miles (talk) 13:45, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

OK, added one mention, but it needs more. I just don't feel I can do this on my own; whenever I read this paper I get questions in particular about the stability and size of any earlier connection across the SoG that are hard to blot out. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 15:07, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

"British isles" etc.

We have a figure text saying

Computer simulation of the flooding of the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar, with the vertical scale exaggerated for better visualization. The view in this image is from the southwest of Gibraltar, with the future Iberian Peninsula in the center-left, northwest Africa in the lower-right, and the British Isles in the upper-left corner.

Clearly, as this is several ice ages ago in Northern Europe, and e.g. the Doggerland region has been alternately exposed and submerged (by ice as well as by water) a number of times in the meantime, the area currently known as the British Isles hardly had a coastline even vaguely similar to the present one. So this figure (and others in the article) seem to assume modern coastlines in regions far from the Mediterranean, simply (I suppose) because showing the modern coastlines makes it easier to understand what area the figure depicts. I would prefer figures showing the ancient landscape in a more realistic way, with modern coastlines shown as an outline in a contrasting colour, but then, more accurate information about these coastlines at that time is perhaps not available, and such figures may not be available from the literature. Therefore, perhaps the best we can do is pointing out this issue in the text.

Am I right? Should this be addressed? Nø (talk) 13:20, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

The map is inaccurate as Britain was permanently connected to the Continent by the Weald–Artois Anticline until it was destroyed by the Anglian Glaciation 450,000 years ago. I think it is best to remove the reference to the British Isles in the article and note the error in the image description. Dudley Miles (talk) 16:49, 2 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks; I've now added a disclaimer about the coastlines of Northern Europe. Nø (talk) 12:09, 5 November 2025 (UTC)

Estimating Number of Iterations of Zanclean Flood(s)

I would like to galvanize specificity about number of times or iterations the Zanclean Flood has occurred. As widely held consensus suggests that the Missoula / Bretz Floods did occur dozens of times (ie this relatively old-yet-still-relevant USGS article), it seems likely that the Zanclean Floods have a similar history. It's tough to discern which of our interglacial cycles could be enough to trigger a Zanclean-style flood, but we've had hundreds of interglacial cycles in the past 5.33 million years or so. Would it be so wild to hypothesize the Mediterranean could have filled and dried up dozens or hundreds of times? I'd love to see any relevant papers on this! Carl.r.larson (talk) 19:11, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

This is briefly covered in Mediterranean Sea#Messinian salinity crisis, which cites papers supporting and denying repeated desiccation/flood cycles. Dudley Miles (talk) 22:27, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

As far as I know, the academic literature does not support the notion of multiple Zanclean floods b/c the Espartel and Camarinal Sills are far too deep to fall dry during glacials & it's not clear that multiple floods could create the current bathymetry of the Strait itself nor any of the other effects that a single giant Zanclean flood would produce. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 07:48, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

New article

Doug Weller talk 09:04, 25 June 2026 (UTC)