“I couldn’t make this schist up even if I tried” by guest David Middleton
From the American Association for the Advancement of Science…
Although the Messenian salinity crisis and the subsequent Zankerin Flood constitute one of the most incredible events in geological history…so incredible that the uppermost phase of the Miocene was named Messenian Xenia, the lowermost stage of the Pliocene was named Zankelin… no mass extinction related to it.
Article A of AAAS cites a very interesting paper:
Agiadi and her colleagues have now tracked the extinction and subsequent recovery through a comprehensive analysis of most fossils from the region, published today in Science Advances.
Fossils tell story of devastating mass extinction as Mediterranean dried up
So…this is not just a mass extinction…but an extinction with a resurgence. Why use the word “extinction”? Let’s take a look at the topic research papers:
coral reef biodiversity
Cooling directly affected temperature-sensitive organisms such as tropical reef-building corals and their associated fauna (reef fish and sharks) and bryozoans, leading to the local extinction of large populations, especially in the eastern Mediterranean (Fig. 1) (40). Furthermore, the decrease in Mediterranean water temperatures allowed the distribution of boreal species to expand into the basin during the Messinian period, while the strongly thermophilic Tethys relict species disappeared. Monegatti and Raffi (33) pointed out that the MSC caused a large-scale disappearance of regional molluscs, but the actual number of extinctions was limited, and the largest Messenian extinction occurred in the Atlantic Ocean and was triggered by the TG22, TG20, TG14 and TG12 glaciers during the MSC. In the Zanklin River, this effect is further exacerbated by the establishment of cold air masses in the Atlantic Ocean (41). For example, the great white shark (shark) and blue shark (green sandpiper) first appeared at the global Miocene/Pliocene boundary (42) and the Mediterranean Sea after MSC (43).
MSC played a crucial role in the local extinction of shallow-water z coral reefs, but it may not be the primary driver (40, 44). Z-Coral, as a tropical coral reef, is highly sensitive to temperature.
Agiadi et al.2024
When is extinction not extinction? when it undergoes local extinction. A “limited number of actual extinctions” occurred in the Atlantic Ocean and were triggered by glacial events, not MSCs.
The Messenian Salinity Crisis and the Great Flood of Zanclint apparently constitute “a story of turmoil and war triumphs and defeats. The Gothic tale tells of radical change, of times of peace, and then of great trauma again.”
During the late Miocene, the Mediterranean Sea effectively dried up and deposited a layer of halite and gypsum about a mile thick (Messenian Salinity Crisis). Then in the early Pliocene there was a rapid flooding of the Mediterranean (the Zankerian Flood), leading to the formation of the modern Mediterranean. The Zan Clint Flood was a crazy flood. If Gavin Schmidt's Silurian civilization flourished on the Messinian salt flats in the late Miocene, the Zanclint Flood would have wiped them out without a trace. The transition from the MSC to the Zanclean megaflood marks the transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene. It left a profound imprint on the stratigraphic record.
Some reconstructions of the Zanclint Flood suggest that Mediterranean sea levels may have risen at a rate of 10 meters per day during the peak flow of water from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin.
Now, that’s what I call climate change!
“The largest ocean in history is dying”…because of unwarranted references to climate change
The MSC resulted in the deposition of a thick layer of evaporites (salt, gypsum, anhydrite, etc.) in the Mediterranean basin:
However, this is not a story of extinction, let alone a story of mass extinction. We can attribute this to a combination of good science and bad science journalism.
refer to
Bowman, Steven. (2011). “Regional seismic interpretation of oil and gas exploration prospects offshore Syria”. geography arabia. 16.
Constantina Agiadi et al.the transformation of Mediterranean biodiversity in the late Miocene. science. adverb. 10eadp1134 (2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adp1134
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