Guest “I couldn’t make this sort of schist up, even if I was trying” by David Middleton
From the American Association for the Advancement of Science of America…
While the Messinian Salinity Crisis and subsequent Zanclean Megaflood comprise one of the most incredible episodes in geologic history… So incredible that the uppermost stage of the Miocene epoch is named the Messinian and the lowermost stage of the Pliocene epoch is named the Zanclean… There was no MASS extinction associated with it.
The AAAS of A article references a very interesting paper:
Agiadi and her colleagues have now traced the extinctions and subsequent recovery with a comprehensive analysis of most of the fossils from this region, published today in Science Advances.
Fossils tell tale of devastating mass extinction when Mediterranean dried up
So… Not only was it not a mass extinction.., It was an extinction from which there was a recovery. Why use the word “extinction” at all? Let’s go to the subject research paper:
Coral reef biodiversity
The cooling directly affected temperature-sensitive organisms such as the tropical reef-building z-corals and their associated faunas (reef fishes and sharks) and bryozoans, leading to local extinction of vast populations, particularly in the Eastern Mediterranean (Fig. 1) (40). In addition, the decrease of water temperatures in the Mediterranean allowed boreal species to expand their distribution to the basin during the Messinian, while strongly thermophilic Tethyan relic species disappeared. Monegatti and Raffi (33) noted that the MSC caused regional mass disappearances of molluscs but only a limited number of actual extinctions and that the greatest Messinian extinctions took place in the Atlantic Ocean and were triggered by the TG22, TG20, TG14, and TG12 glacials during the MSC. In the Zanclean, the establishment of psychrospheric water masses in the Atlantic further exacerbated this impact (41). For example, the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias) and the blue shark (Prionace glauca) first appeared globally at the Miocene/Pliocene boundary (42) and in the Mediterranean after the MSC (43).
The MSC played a crucial role in the local extinction of shallow-water z-coral reefs, but it was probably not the main driver (40, 44). Z-corals, as tropical reef corals, are highly sensitive to temperature.
When is an extinction not an extinction? When it’s a local extinction. The “limited number of actual extinctions” occurred in the Atlantic Ocean and were triggered by glacial episodes, not the MSC.
The Messinian Salinity Crisis and Zanclean Megaflood clearly comprise “a tale of upheaval and battles won and lost. Gothic tales of sweeping change, peaceful times, and then great trauma again.“
During the late Miocene, the Mediterranean Sea literally dried up and deposited a layer of halite and gypsum about a mile thick (Messinian salinity crisis). Then in the early Pliocene Epoch, the Mediterranean rapidly flooded (Zanclean megaflood), leading to the formation of the modern Mediterranean Sea. The Zanclean megaflood was a doozy. If Gavin Schmidt’s Silurian civilization had been thriving on the Messinian salt flats during the Late Miocene, the Zanclean megaflood would have wiped them out without a trace. The transition from the MSC to the Zanclean megaflood marks the transition from the Miocene to the Pliocene. It left a serious mark on the stratigraphic record.
Some reconstructions of the Zanclean megaflood suggest that sea level in the Mediterranean could have risen at a rate of 10 meters per day during the peak flow of water from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean basin.
- A Megaflood-Powered Mile-High Waterfall Refilled the Mediterranean
- Evidence of the Zanclean megaflood in the eastern Mediterranean Basin
- Catastrophic Flood of the Mediterranean After the Messinian Salinity Crisis
Now, that’s what I call climate change!
“History’s Greatest Sea is Dying”… Because Gratuitous Reference to Climate Change
The MSC caused the deposition of a thick layer of evaporites (salt, gypsum, anhydrite, etc.) across the Mediterranean basin:
However, this is not an extinction story, much less a mass extinction story. We can chalk this up to a combination of good science and bad science journalism.
References
Bowman, Steven. (2011). “Regional seismic interpretation of the hydrocarbon prospectivity of offshore Syria”. GeoArabia. 16.
Konstantina Agiadi et al., Late Miocene transformation of Mediterranean Sea biodiversity. Sci. Adv. 10, eadp1134 (2024). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adp1134
Otherwise known as an extirpation. From https://apps.usgs.gov/thesaurus/term-simple.php?thcode=2&code=365 :
Extinction is the complete disappearance of a species from the earth. Extirpation is the complete disappearance (elimination) of a species from a given region, island, or area.
Is there a similar word for journalists? They aren’t all sacked, just a few of them, the bad ones.
But where do you start?
I’d start with the headline writers. They often know nothing about what they’re trying to get us to read. 🙂
Er, aren’t those generally Editors?
Not editors , they used to be called sub editors but now they are called production journalists ….who write click bait headlines and either shorten stories or pad them out
G’Day Ric
“I’d start with the headline writers. They often know nothing…”
All too often the “headline” consists of the first sentence of the article. (That’s why I truncated the quote where I did.)
that’s called a constirpation
Duuh! If the Mediterranean dried up, only halophilic species would survive in the remaining salt ponds. What it would do outside the Med basin is another thing entirely.
There still are a number of places in the world where the water dries up leaving salt deposits. There are also what are called catastrophic mortalities from physical factors like temperature and biological like red tides. I have seen the “Cayo Del Infernillo” off Baffin Bay, Texas dried up. Connection entrance dries up in summer from lower sea level. It was full of dead crabs and and a euryhaline fish in rings representing the amount of evaporation producing lethal salinities, crabs first. I wonder if the Mediterranean showed something like this.
Brongersma-Sanders, Margaretha. 1957. Mass mortality in the sea. In. J. W. Hedgpeth, Ed., Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology. Memoir Geolological Society America. 67(1):941-1010, a classic apparently not read anymore, has this interesting statement. “Heavy outbreaks of red water causing catastrophic killing are restricted to the most productive parts–viz. to highly eutrophic, and particularly to hypertrophic water.” Also she cautioned that these are not catastrophic in the geological sense as and suggested the word “anastrophe” that nobody ever uses for lesser events. Some are impressive as the 1880 simultaneous red-tide kill in South Africa and Florida and tilefish (also cod and hake) in 1879-1882 in the northwest Atlantic. The latter were ~14 pound fishes once found in an area of 170 X 25 miles.
Humans do tend to exaggerate!
Not all humans. Just some.
And in related news, today EurekaAlert flagged an alarming new paper in the ‘never heard of before’ journal PeerJ—Life and Environment. It claims that two fingered sloths are in danger of extinction from climate change by 2100.
Something about their slow metabolism cannot cope with more heat, while
ignoring their wide Central and South American range, and the highland/lowland subspecies. More slothful ‘climate science’ extinction alarm.
At least, after 2100, the surviving sloths will be able to gesture appropriately.
2 fingers to that old bollocks . If 3 fingered sloths can cope very well, although about as slothfully as a truth spreads through a climate scientist community then can being a digit short of a handful make all that difference. As preposterouis as saying “An octopus has 8 testicles” – a load of balls!
Hey, it wasn’t me.
The paper said two fingered. If they also have three, that just adds to ‘credibility’ since it immediately becomes obvious that two fingered sloths WILL become climate extinct, since they already are.
Oh – the link that is “a tale of upheaval and battles won and lost. Gothic tales of sweeping change, peaceful times, and then great trauma again.” goes to a web page titled “From the Earth to the Moon (1998) s01e10 Episode Script.”
It should go to what it quotes, i.e. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/12/20/historys-greatest-sea-is-dying-because-gratuitous-reference-to-climate-change/
I was wondering how Gavin Schmidt and his Siluarians made it from the Earth to the Moon.
I try not to cite my own posts, when there is an alternative… 😉
David do you know of any side scan sonar proprietary or public domain in the abysal plains of the Med I’ll tell you why when you answer.
Not specifically. But, a Google of “mediterranean sea sidescan sonar” returns a lot of hits.
Why is there Noah account in the human record? I guess it was all wiped Zan-clean long before. 😉
I just swatted three flies in my house! Mass extinction!
Nope. House extirpation.
Three cheers (and fly corpses) for Rud!
If there were only 3 in the house at the beginning of his killing spree.
Did he get the fly on the wall
Shoulda made a documentary
I prefer to massacre them with my ‘bugassault’ weapon.
And, unquestionably caused by Man.
First author Konstantina Agiadi uses these words in a 2022 funding grant application:
“Marine ecosystems around the world are changing today at a degree unprecedented in human history. The eastern Mediterranean Sea in particular is a unique ecosystem; this small-scale ocean is currently one of the areas most affected by climate change, the invasion of alien species from the Red Sea, and habitat deterioration due to human activities.”
Middle-aged female researchers approaching menopause are subjected to hormonal changes that lead to this parody:
“Women around the world are changing today at a degree unprecedented in human history. The approximately 50-year-old western woman in academia in particular is a unique and recent ecosystem; this small sub-population of researchers is one of those most affected by and affecting the climate change narrative, the invasion of skeptical dissenters from enlightened educations and social habitat degradation due to human alarmism activities.”
Professor Agiadi includes in her present activity, writing research grants and facilitating the publication of papers by others. My subjective feeling is that she is not doing this well. For example she chooses to spell “nannoplankton” when mainstream science has widely used “nanoplankton”. She uses unscientific expressions like “In the Late Miocene, the global climate cooling (8) and the basin’s stepwise restriction from the Atlantic Ocean preceding the Messinian salinity crisis (MSC; Fig. 1) (9–12) led to extreme sensitivity to climatic perturbations within the Mediterranean, which manifested as high-amplitude variability in both temperature and salinity (Fig. 1) (13–16).
What is “extreme sensitivity”? What “crisis”? She compares the rate of change of processes back in proxy time, with present time, without adequately addressing the important, large difference in time resolution.
David Middleton has written other criticisms. I concur that the science is good, as it should be since Agadi has researched it for 30 years, but its telling is poor and clichéd. This draws attention to the wider aspect of more female authors entering the world of scientific publication, formerly male-dominated. Female writers need to understand that (like males) they carry biological baggage that needs to be corrected. The reaction to a baby crying is not to be confused with the reaction to a scientific discovery.
(Disclaimer: Nothing I have written here is sexist. I am reporting on the reality of a problem for female authors with no inferences about whether I like or dislike females. My wife and I celebrated our 60th Anniversary back in May. It is a shame that I have to write this disclaimer to pacify other women with bigger problems).
60 years! You are a lucky man. 🙂
It’s nice to see Mr. Middleton making posts again.