Messinian

It's just extraordinary.

We discovered about the Messinian-Sinaitic crisis only in the 70s.

There was some exploratory work going on in the Mediterranean, and they discovered salt deposits at the bottom of the seabed that were two kilometers thick in places.

And it locked up a huge amount of salt.

The only way to create that kind of erosion is with truly catastrophic water velocities maintained over months or years.

one of the most dramatic pieces of evidence comes from seismic surveys of the mediterranean sea floor these surveys use sound waves to image the layers of sediment and rock beneath the ocean floor what they reveal is remarkable The evaporate layers from the Messinian period aren't smooth and continuous.

They're deeply eroded, carved into complex three-dimensional patterns by the returning water.

Some areas show erosional channels stacked on top of each other, suggesting multiple stages of flooding as the water level rose and currents shifted.

Before the flood, when the basin was slowly filling with whatever water could trickle in from rivers and occasional Atlantic breakthroughs, it was shallow.

We're talking about a sea that, in its pre-crisis form, was maybe 500 to 800 metres shallower than today in some areas.

The Messinian crisis had evaporated all that depth away, turned it into salt deposits kilometres thick.

When the flood refilled the basin, it didn't just restore the old shorelines.

These form when thick layers of waterlogged clay are buried, compacted, and then squeezed dry over time, cracking into polygon shapes as they shrink.

Around six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea almost entirely dried up in an event now known as the Messinian salinity crisis, leaving behind thick salt deposits and distinctive cracked terrain as it evaporated, and the authors think the same thing could have happened on Venus.

And it doesn't end there.

The planet also has other features that could have formed in similar ways, including long, winding channels called canalie, usually assumed to have been carved by flowing lava, but which Gale and colleagues suggest are similar to submarine channels here on Earth carved by water on ancient sea floors.