You remember that time a few years back, at Christmas, when your Uncle Petey decided he was going to be Santa this year, but he was drunk and Aunt Janet tried to stop him? And then he got on the roof with his dumb Santa hat on and a beard he had made out of car seat cover turned inside out and he was up there shouting ‘HO HO HO’ until the neighbors called the cops and they had to taze him to get him down? And then he spent the whole of Christmas in jail because the bond place wasn’t open and nobody had the $600 to bail his dumb ass out?
Well, that wasn’t the biggest thing that ever happened.
Nor was it when you got married, or that time when you had a kid, or that time when you went to the doctor and they told you that you had six weeks to live, but it turns out they had no idea what they were talking about and all that was wrong with you was an ulcer, but you spent a week in hospital and dined out on that story for 2 solid years.
Nor was it that time when you were in that car wreck and the car flipped ‘20 times’ and you broke all three of your legs, twice. Or when you fell off a horse when you were ten. Or when you won a swimming race that one time and you had dreams of the Olympics which died when you discovered Marlboro Lights and vodka.
No. The biggest thing that ever happened, or more precisely, The Biggest Thing That Ever Happened, didn’t happen to you, or to Uncle Petey, or even in your lifetime. Or in the lifetime of any Homo Sapiens. It happened about five and a half million years ago and it was, if I may put this somewhat bluntly, unbelievably fucking epic.
If you’ve never heard the term Messinian Salinity Crisis, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a particularly grating early work by 80s floppy haircut misery pounders A Flock of Seagulls. Instead, what it describes is a geological period in which the entire Mediterranean Sea Basin completely dried up. From what is now North Africa, to the shores of southern France, from Israel and Egypt, all the way to the Straits of Gibraltar, the entire Mediterranean dried up, became scrubland, then desiccated into an arid wasteland of blowing dust, super high salinity marshland and prehistoric mega rats. A tortured, howling, scoured, Fallout deathscape of nothingness, thousands of meters deep. Ocean deep. A gypsum filled bathtub of gloom. Like Coventry, but with camels.
You get the idea.
If you were standing there, all those millions of years ago, you would have strained your neck to look up at the rock of Gibraltar, now a pinnacle mountain high above the surrounding plains. On each side, only a few miles away, cliffs that now form the coast of Spain would have soared thousands of meters into the dry, burning sky. The air would have been heavy, coarse and sour. Winds would whip cyclone dervishes around you. And for a thousand miles due East, there would have been desert and a low, fetid lake fed by the brackish waters of the great river Rhone. Beyond that a huge ridge formed down the spine of Italy and across the Straits of Sicily, forming an immense, Misty Mountain barrier with a screaming drop miles deep onto the Sauron plains of the Eastern Mediterranean seabed, far beyond.
It was the land of Mordor, where the shadows lie.
Cave bears. Giant sloths. Weird, bulgy-eyed camels. Tigers the size of a Buick all roamed the desolation. Oh, and some pretty cool goats, too. Because it won’t be the cockroaches that survive Armageddon. It will be the goats. So at least there will be cheese.
And you might think to yourself that this is The Biggest Thing That Ever Happened, Ever. This great scabbing of planet Earth. A climate driven, seismic, volcanic, geological torture of a planet. The very seas boiled salt dry and smoking. A husk dry dustbowl the size of an ocean.
But it isn’t The Biggest Thing That Ever Happened, Ever.
Because one day, around five and a half million years ago, the great gypsum crust bridge that had dammed the Straits of Gibraltar cracked and, very quickly - very quickly indeed - the Mediterranean Sea began to fill up again.
It’s easy to imagine this happening like a waterfall, albeit a really tall one. Picture a huge gushing Angel Falls torrent of water, pouring through the crack in the Straits of Gibraltar as millions of gallons of water began to fill the enormous seabed over centuries, even over millennia.
But that’s not what happened. Whatever caused the plug to fail - seismic activity or pressure from the Atlantic Ocean groaning against it for thousands of years, it failed with unimaginable brutality.
Trillions of gallons of water flooded in. And not even a waterfall. The huge land plug that stretched dozens and dozens of miles inland from the Atlantic coast was simply obliterated. A channel some 300 meters - a thousand feet - deep and 200 kilometers long smashed through the continents and the water flowed at mind-blowing rates.
3.5 billion cubic feet of water a second flowed through the channel. A thousand times the flow of the Amazon. Like a terrifying, colossal, rampant fire-hydrant, the Atlantic Ocean simply tried to move into the new space as quickly as it could.
The flow of water was so immense, it tore grooves into the crust of the planet. For years it had been believed that the Mediterranean took centuries to fill. The western Mediterranean, as far as the mountain range across the Straits of Sicily was full within a year.
If there had been any hominids around to see it, and there were, it would have been terrifying. For hundreds of miles in each direction, the Earth would have shaken to the sound of the fury. It would have felt like the end of the world.
But that wasn’t all. Because the water kept coming and coming, up against the mountains separating the eastern Mediterranean from the west until, thousands of meters deep and ever relentless, it breached them. Down the other side came a waterfall of hundreds of billions of gallons of water, two miles high. At hundreds of miles per hour, a titanic wall of sea began to fill the deeper, much deeper, eastern seabed of the Mediterranean. It filled at the rate dozens of meters per hour. The whole thing. You could have watched it from space, filling like a sink. The whole eastern portion was full within months.
The roar of the water alone would have caused massive seismic activity across Europe and northern Africa.
Planet Earth has had several megafloods in its history, but none of them compare to what happened when the Mediterranean filled. The flood that filled the Black Sea through the Bosporus would have been pretty cool, but like a spilled teacup in comparison.
This big one is called the Zanclean Deluge, which also sounds like a particularly obscure jazz-funk, limited-edition Berlin era David Bowie album from 1977
One of those floods may be the inspiration for one of the many flood myths shared by civilizations all over the world. But the idea that the human myth-mind still carries in it a trace of the Zanclean event is a romantic, if extremely unlikely idea.
If anyone did see it. They would certainly not have forgotten about it.