Ah, the Mediterranean. Synonymous with beautiful seaside towns, incredible sunsets, and world-famous culinary delights, it is no wonder that Mediterranean towns are a favorite with holidaymakers all over the world.
This temperate region features must-visit European destinations including Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Athens, Ibiza, and the Amalfi Coast. The main thing that all these places have in common? They’re all situated on the Mediterranean Sea.
This sea, which spreads between Europe, Africa, and Asia totals approximately 970,000 square miles, and is pretty warm. With an average temperature of 13 degrees celsius, the water temperature can reach around 30 degrees closer to Africa. This is because it is mostly enclosed, meaning that colder oceans do not flow into it in many places; due to its temperate location, there is also a lot of evaporation here compared to other oceans, making the water extra salty.
But if this is your holiday destination of choice, you might want to take note: the Mediterranean Sea won’t be around forever. In oceanic terms, the Mediterranean is actually quite young: it formed around five and a half million years ago, as a result of the world’s biggest flood which ocean-ified a previously hot, dry desert. This flood created what would ultimately become swanky vacation spots like Santorini, and cradles of history including Athens.
According to Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, a geophysicist at the Institute of Earth Science Jaume Almera in Barcelona, a huge deluge of water broke down a ridge to fill the Mediterranean basin, filling it from the Atlantic over the course of a couple of years. This formed the ocean that we know today, as Garcia-Castellanos explained in an interview with the British newspaper, The Guardian:
“The flow of water increased rapidly until it was truly catastrophic. The column of water going down that slope was several hundred metres deep, and in a channel like this would have reached speeds of more than 100km per hour.”
And unfortunately for the Mediterranean, youth does not equal longevity in this case. In fact, it is suggested that as the Earth’s tectonic plates move, causing continents to shift and change (as they have been doing throughout history), the Mediterranean Sea could cease to exist.
In the same way that our continents were once one large landmass that split over billions of years to create the world that we know today, these continents will change over time. And as the African plate continues to collide with the Eurasian plate – a historic point of collision that, among other things, resulted in the creation of the Alps – the Mediterranean sea may be erased as a new supercontinent forms.
Over time, the sea’s area will become smaller, and subject to more and more evaporation before it returns to a similar state to that it was in over five million years ago: dry, albeit quite salty, land.
The good news? It’s certainly not going to happen in our lifetime.
In fact, it will take millions or even billions more years before this change takes place.
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