Messinian Salinity Crisis - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

There had been speculations about a possible dehydration of the Mediterranean Sea in the distant past, even before geology developed.

• In the first century, Pliny the Elder recounted a popular story in his Natural History according to which the Mediterranean Sea was created when the Atlantic ocean gained admission through the Strait of Gibraltar:

At the narrowest part of the Straits, there are mountains placed to form barriers to the entrance on either side, Abyla in Africa, and Calpe in Europe, the boundaries formerly of the Labours of Hercules. Hence it is that the inhabitants have called them the Columns of that god; they also believe that they were dug through by him; upon which the sea, which was before excluded, gained admission, and so changed the face of nature.

• In 1920, H. G. Wells published a popular history book in which it was suspected that the Mediterranean basin had in the past been cut off from the Atlantic. One piece of physical evidence, a deep channel past Gibraltar, had been noticed. Wells estimated that the basin had refilled roughly between 30,000 and 10,000 BCE. The theory he printed was that:
  • In the last Ice Age, so much ocean water was taken into the icecaps that world ocean level dropped below the sill in the Strait of Gibraltar.
  • Without the inflow from the Atlantic the Mediterranean would evaporate much more water than it receives, and would evaporate down to two large lakes, one on the Balearic Abyssal Plain, the other further east.
  • The east lake would receive most of the incoming river water, and may have overflowed into the west lake.
  • All or some of this seabed may have had a human population, where it was watered from the incoming rivers.
  • There is a long deep submerged valley running from the Mediterranean out into the Atlantic.
  • (Modern research, however, has shown that Wells' theory is incorrect. All the geological and plant-fossil evidence shows that the Mediterranean did not dry out during the last ice age. Sea levels were 120m lower than today, resulting in a shallower Strait of Gibraltar and a reduced water exchange with the Atlantic, but there was no cut-off.)

• Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories (1932) picture a Hyborian Age where the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea are both dry.
• Poul Anderson's Time Patrol story "Gibraltar Falls" (1975) takes place while the Atlantic begins to fill the Mediterranean Sea; here "falls" means "waterfall".
• Harry Turtledove's novella "Down in the Bottomlands," which takes place on an alternate Earth where the Mediterranean Sea stayed empty, and void of water, and part of it is a national park to the countries around it, none of which are nations that we are familiar with in the real world. In this continuum, other differences that might have developed are:
  • Egypt as we know it would not have developed: little or no agriculture would be possible in the Nile's canyon, and the Nile's alluvial fan in the "Mediterranean Sink" would be too hot for human habitation. The Nile canyon would have been a major barrier to travel.
  • Harsher climates and extensive zones of impassable desert between habitable areas rendered the economic and material basis of classical civilizations so different that any ancient civilizations in Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, and Carthage would have been very different or impossible.
• An early Dan Dare science fiction comic story says as a side remark that (in its time line) the Mediterranean stayed dry until Neolithic times and was flooded by alien spaceships exploding, breaking the Strait of Gibraltar open.
• Atlantropa, also referred to as Panropa, was a gigantic engineering and colonization project devised by the German architect Herman Sörgel in the 1920s and promulgated by him until his death in 1952. Its central feature was a hydroelectric dam to be built across the Strait of Gibraltar, and the lowering of the surface of the Mediterranean Sea by up to 200 metres. Similar projects have appeared in fiction.
• A draft version of the Space Odyssey series says that (in its time line) the Mediterranean bed stayed dry into human times and that the legend of Atlantis derived from the Mediterranean reflooding.
• The episode "The Vanished Sea" of the Animal Planet/ORF/ZDF-produced television series The Future Is Wild posits a world 5 million years in the future where the Mediterranean Basin has again dried up, and explores what kind of life could survive the new climate.
• Julian May's 1980s science fiction books The Many Colored Land and The Golden Torc are set in Europe just before and during the rupture at Gibraltar. The rupture and the rapid filling of the Mediterranean form a Wagnerian climax to The Golden Torc, in which aliens and time-traveling humans are caught up in this cataclysm.
• The Gandalara Cycle by Randall Garrett and Vicki Ann Heydron chronicles the adventures of Ricardo, a modern earth man, sent into the past, where he discovers an entire civilization at the bottom of the dry Mediterranean.
• Wolfgang Jeschke's time-travel novel, The Last Day of Creation happens 5 million years ago while the Mediterranean bed was dry.