This causes its water to be more salty, since salt compounds are left behind to dissolve into a reducing volume of water. As the Mediterranean Sea evaporated over time, salt was left behind.

A new study has provided compelling new evidence that a huge “megaflood” refilled the Mediterranean Sea around 5 million ... was a vast expanse of salt flats, known as the Messinian Salinity ...

When the Mediterranean disappeared Since the 1970s, several generations of marine geologists and geophysicists have confirmed the existence of a one to three kilometre thick layer of salt buried ...