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Scientists have describe a gargantuan underwater canyon in the eastern Mediterranean Sea that likely take shape just beforethe ocean transubstantiate to a mile - high table salt field .
The canyon make around 6 million yr ago , at the onslaught of the Messinian salinity crisis ( MSC ) , when the Gibraltar gateway between the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea narrowed and finally filch shut due to teddy in architectonic plates . The Mediterranean Sea became isolated from the man ’s oceans and dry out up for roughly 700,000 year , leave behind a vast expanse of salt up to 2 miles ( 3 kilometers ) thick in some places .
A newly discovered underwater canyon was carved out of the seabed by extremely salty currents.
As sea levels dropped , increasingly salty stream gnaw at the seabed and incise gullies several hundred feet deeply along the outrageous edge of the Mediterranean Sea . In a bailiwick release in the January emergence of the journalGlobal and Planetary Change , direct authorJimmy Moneronand colleagues now describe a jumbo U - shape canyon located 75 miles ( 120 kilometre ) to the south of Cyprus , in the profoundness of the Mediterranean ’s Levant Basin .
The 1,640 - foot - deep ( 500 meters ) and 33,000 - invertebrate foot - all-encompassing ( 10 km ) canon , which the researchers named after the nearby Eratosthenes seamount , likely form underwater shortly before salt pack onto the seabed . Unlike the more coastal gullies , the canon had no older " pre - salt " roots , according to the bailiwick .
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The newly discovered Eratosthenes Canyon sits close to the Eratosthenes seamount in the eastern Mediterranean sea.
" To explain the submarine formation of the Eratosthenes Canyon , we hint incision by dull gravity currents rub and cut up the deep - water supply seafloor , " the research worker write in the cogitation .
matter down with salt and deposit , these current festinate along faster than the surrounding water and gradually scoop out enough of the seabed to take shape the colossal canyon . on the dot when this occurred stay on indecipherable , but it likely coincided with the beginning of the MSC — between 5.6 million and 6 million class ago , consort to the subject area . The incision process may have go anywhere from ten-spot of yard to half a million years .
The find sheds light on a decades - long debate over whether Messinian gullies and canyons that now lie underwater take shape above or below the ocean surface . " This raw evidence strengthens the tilt that at least part of the eating away across continental tolerance occurred [ below water ] , " the researchers wrote .
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The newly discovered canyon sits within a wider web of canon and channels in an area known asthe Levant Basin , which extends from the slide of Syria in the north to Gaza in the south , and northwest toward Cyprus .
To the northwest of the canyon , beyond the Eratosthenes seamount , sits the much deeper and quondam Herodotus basin , which receives current loaded with deposit from the southeast . These stream may have crossed the domain that now boasts the Eratosthenes Canyon long before it was incise , allot to the work .
" The absence of old root under the Eratosthenes Canyon does not rule out the possibility that a shallow pre - MSC channel system predate the Eratosthenes Canyon , " the researcher compose .
