A little over 5 million years ago, water from the Atlantic Ocean found a way through the present-day Strait of Gibraltar. According to this theory, oceanic water rushed faster than a speeding car down a kilometre-high slope towards the empty Mediterranean Sea, excavating a skyscraper-deep trough on its way.

The Med was, at the time, a largely dry and salty basin, but so much water poured in that it filled up in just a couple of years – maybe even just a few months. At its peak, the flood discharged about 1,000 times the water of the modern-day Amazon river...

Read the full story at Times2.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.