Throughout its history, our planet has been reshaped by enormous and cataclysmic events. Asteroid impacts can do that, or mile-thick volcanic outflows like the Deccan Traps.
It turns out the Mediterranean Sea has a catastrophic story of its own:
Mike Sowden is a former travel writer who publishes at Everything is Amazing.
He tells the story brilliantly, so I’ll leave it to him:
You can click through to Sowden’s thread to read the full story on Twitter.
In the Pacific Northwest, we have our own megaflood story, and it helped reshape scientific perspectives on geology! Are you familiar with the Missoula floods?
Geologists in the latter part of the 18th century had developed the concept of deep time. Through the 1800s, scientists mostly held the assumption that natural laws and processes are stable and consistent across the universe.
Thus, everything on Earth must have been formed by slow processes going back eons: Uniformitarianism.
That changed when a geologist named J. Harlen Bretz investigated the channeled scablands, cataracts and coulees of eastern Washington in the early 1920s.
(source)
It would take until the 1970s to confirm Bretz’s idea with satellite imagery, but scientists began to warm up to catastrophism as an alternative to slow, uniform processes forming the world.
It’s fascinating to imagine a flood of 550 cubic miles of water, carrying house-sized boulders and glacial remnants in a surge of water 400 feet high — with as much force as all the world’s rivers combined.
Traces of the Missoula floods can be found in Oregon too, including erratic boulders that were once encased in ice as they floated into the Willamette Valley—which was more of a lake for a while. At some points during the 40-ish separate floods, the entire Columbia River would have been 950 feet above river level, pouring over the gorge walls in places.
Last week was the first I heard about the Zanclean Megaflood in the Mediterranean. It was first theorized by Daniel Garcia-Castellanos in 2003. I’m sure he was inspired to look at the evidence from such a catastrophic perspective because of the incredible geology around the Pacific Northwest.
Really enjoyed this post. Fascinating.