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The Tethys Salinity Crisis

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From 5.96 to 5.33 million years ago, disaster struck the Mediterranean Sea. A tectonic snag turned this...

Image of modern Mediterranean Sea

...into something like this.

Image of Mediterranean Sea drastically dried up, with the Iberian peninsula fused with Africa, the Tyrrhenian Sea is dry, and the Suez canal is land.

In this alternate scenario, the sea separating modern Europe from modern Africa isn't the Mediterranean, but one of our old friends, the Tethys.

Image of the Mediterranean swollen with Turkey and Iran underwater, connecting the Persian Gulf with the Mediterranean.

As you can see, unlike the more shut-door Mediterranean, the Tethys has two openings--the Atlantic on one side and the Indian on another. Assume that the Tethys had its own salinity crisis in its geological history. With connections to both the Atlantic and the Indian, would the extent of evaporation and dehydration be as bad as back home? Better? Or worse?

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/56120. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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