[cogitator]

I guess the mechanism is news, because the scientific knowledge that this happened goes back decades. I remember seeing an artist's conception of the "Falls of Gibraltar" (when the land bridge blocking the Straits of Gibraltar was breached) from the late 1970s? The picture sort of looked like super-Iguazu.

Messinian Salinity Crisis

[SunkenCiv]

Some of the story of that research can be found in the beginning of the book “Noah’s Flood”. Either Ryan or Pitman (or was it both?) was one of the discoverers.

[gleeaikin]

If I remember correctly, H.G. Wells in his “Outline of History” has a map at the end of the last Ice Age showing the Mediterranian as two large inland seas with a land bridge at Gibraltar and Sicily. I believe the conjecture was that as the sea rose it flooded over Gibraltar, filled the Med. and may have been one source of some of the early flood myths. I sure hope that underwater archeology will start making serious searches around what would have been early river mouths which are now underwater.