Interresting
sinp~ about 3/4 down the page. 
The Earth wobbles like a top around its axis as it spins, in a roughly 20,000-year cycle. That shift affects how much sunlight certain parts of the Earth receive at different points in the cycle, thereby changing the climate. In the Mediterranean Sea area, sediments are striped with dark and light bands that correspond to surges and die-offs of sea life as a result of those climactic shifts.

snip~
SAN FRANCISCO — About 6 million years ago, a mile-high field of salt formed across the entire Mediterranean seafloor, sucking up 6 percent of the oceans' salt.


Now, new research has pinpointed when key events during the formation of that "salt giant" occurred. The new research, presented here Dec. 11 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, could help unravel the mystery behind the great salt crisis.

Salt crisis
Every so often, huge accumulations of the world's salt form in one place. The most recent salt crisis happened during the Miocene Epoch, which lasted from about 23 million to 5 million years ago.


About 6 million years ago, the Strait of Gibraltar linking the Mediterranean with the Atlantic Ocean was closed and instead, two channels — one in Northern Morocco and another in Southern Spain — fed the sea with salty water and let it flow out, said study co-author Rachel Flecker, a geologist at the University of Bristol in England.

But during the Messinian Salinity Crisis, as this particular event is known, Eurasia was colliding with Africa, squishing the outlet flow for the Mediterranean Sea. But tectonic shifts left the basin floor below the outlet channel between the two water bodies intact. Dense salty water from the Atlantic rushed in, but couldn't leave the sea. Water evaporated; salt piled high; and sea life collapsed.


"It wasn't a nice place," Flecker said.

In a series of pulses over about 600,000 years, the sea dried out, and a 1-mile-high (1.5 kilometer) salt wall grew across the Mediterranean seafloor, a "bit like the Dead Sea, a huge brine field," Flecker told LiveScience. (In places, it might have been even higher.)


more @
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/6-million-years-ago-mediterranean-was-mile-high-salt-field-2D11783303

Interesting, but why do they keep referring to it as a crisis?

The earth lives in cycles, that's what keeps it alive and why we prosper, but they refer to this life cycle as a crisis as if somehow, change is deadly?
Talk about stupid people dissecting science data with an agenda, when all that was necessary was to tell the reader as to why this all happened and leave out the damned emotion of an anthropological biased view, man had nothing to do with it, you so called journalist!

OK, rant off.

Quote from: Solar on December 23, 2013, 05:40:47 AM
Interesting, but why do they keep referring to it as a crisis?

The earth lives in cycles, that's what keeps it alive and why we prosper, but they refer to this life cycle as a crisis as if somehow, change is deadly?
Talk about stupid people dissecting science data with an agenda, when all that was necessary was to tell the reader as to why this all happened and leave out the damned emotion of an anthropological biased view, man had nothing to do with it, you so called journalist!

OK, rant off.

LOL and they wonder why we have GW off and on.

Quote from: walkstall on December 23, 2013, 04:32:04 PM
LOL and they wonder why we have GW off and on.

Three weeks ago, snowed in with single digit temps around the clock. Today, 75 and beautiful.
But this is normal, always has been, but if one listens to the idiot leftists, it's somehow a man made crisis.

They known that the Med periodically dried up for years. The checked the beds of almost all the oceans flowing into it, and found that they all had deep "V" shaped bottoms cut into bedrock, beneath the sediment; as if the rivers all had much steeper drops down to the sea. The only way to account for that is if the Med was shallower, or not there at all.