A Sea Without Water

1. imagine of Repubblica

If we had lived with our primal ancestors at some point in history we could have easily gone for a walk from Sicily to Tunisia, or organized an uninterrupted marathon Corsica-Tuscany-Croatia.

With the Strait of Gibraltar clogged and hundreds of thousands of miles of salt instead of water the Mediterranean basin would be nothing more than a system of various minor lakes that would envelop the new tongues of land emerged: is called Messinian salinity crisis, a geological event that lasted 270,000 years occurred about 5,9 million years ago as a result of a drastic lowering of the water level that caused the closure of the Strait of Gibraltar and the impossibility for Atlantic waters to flow into the basin, which thus met with rapid evaporation. Living at a time when, fortunately, the issue of climate change (especially caused by human activities) is central and priority, our sensitivity to facts related to this phenomenon has grown increasingly in recent years, because of increasingly frequent environmental disasters and the consequent position taken by local authorities, press, individual citizens.

But if we think that these phenomena today are extremely exceptional it is enough to take a look back in time to discover an infinite series of events, such as the one mentioned above, that have done nothing but erode, to shape, to continually distort the physical geography of the Earth.

The most recent thesis that explains the salinity crisis of Messiniano was formulated based on the studies of an Italian research group that analyzed 60 ice carrots (carrots provide information on the evolution of climatic conditions on Earth thanks to the ability of snow to maintain the same chemical properties) resulting from drilling carried out in the Antarctic Continent: Carrots reveal a rocky erosive phase right in that historical period.The erosion is attributable to an exponential increase in ice of the Antarctic ice sheet which would have consequently reduced the water flow of the oceans and, therefore, caused the reduction of depth between the surface of the seas and the seabed..

2. imagine of ArabPress

After 270,000 years, the Antarctic ice began to recede, raising the level of the oceans again, until the Atlantic broke through the Strait of Gibraltar with a gigantic flood that brought the Mediterranean basin back to its current geography. If apocalyptic episodes like this have always followed cyclically in history we should not remain speechless or with our hands in our hair for any natural event that causes damage but, rather, living with the awareness that accelerating the process through environmental, polluting and destructive alteration activities is a symptom of obtuseness, recklessness and regression.

What our civilization should do is to thank for having had the opportunity to grow during a period of mild and regular climate (the last glacial period ended about 10,000 - 15,000 years ago) which is perhaps the real reason why we are thriving and why our technologies are so advanced from the Neolithic onwards.

If you’re interested, look:

Benvenuti nell'Antropocene, book of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry Paul Crutzen.

·The term Anthropocene indicates the present geological epoch, in which the human being and his activity are attributed the main causes of territorial, structural and climatic changes.