dilact:

bunjywunjy:

bunjywunjy:

sure, this probably isn’t exactly what you meant but here’s a Cursed Sea Fact for you- 

five million years ago, the entire Mediterranean Sea dried up in an event called the Messinian Salinity Crisis.

the sea dried up nearly completely over a period of about a thousand years after tectonic activity blocked off the Strait of Gibralter, leaving salt beds thousand of feet thick that can still be found under the Mediterranean Sea today! there were pockets of water left, but they were so salty that they burned.

so basically this disaster killed off every aquatic species in the Sea in a horrific and inescapable thousand-year extinction event, and is why even today the Mediterranean has no native deep-water species that can be found only there.

this period ended when the Strait was abruptly unblocked, resulting in another catastrophe called the Zanclean Flood. this catastrophic flood event refilled the entire Sea in a period of a just couple of years, and in turn totally obliterated whatever land creatures had moved into the empty Sea basin. what goes around comes around, I guess.

also, ‘Messinian Salinity Crisis’ is kind of a meh name for a planet-altering geological catastrophe, but ‘Zanclean Flood’ would be a great name for a folk rock band!

I can’t believe Hercules drowned all those animals