Gibraltar Falls

Anyone who's read a bunch of Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol" stories (there's an omnibus collection, by the way) will remember the setting of "Gibraltar Falls".

Apparently there are some new discoveries of sediments left from both the ancient salt flats and the flood that covered them.

"The serene turquoise waters of the Mediterranean Sea hide a sharp-tasting secret: a layer of salt up to two miles thick, lurking deep underneath the basin. The ghostly white minerals are one of the few traces of an ancient Mediterranean Sea that vanished millions of years ago. Some scientists believe that the entire sea evaporated for a time, desiccated like the Sahara to the south.

Even after decades of study, the details surrounding the sea’s vanishing act and the torrents of water that refilled the basin remain an enduring mystery. The refilling of the Mediterranean about five million years ago may have been the biggest flood in our planet’s history. By one estimate, the cascade of water that filled the cavernous basin was about 500 times larger than the flow of the Amazon River.

“It was a sensational thing,” says Daniel García-Castellanos of the Institute of Earth Sciences Jaume Almera in Spain. In a recent analysis published in Earth-Science Reviews, Garcia-Castellanos and his team identified a pocket of sediments that may have been deposited by the megaflood."

Anderson was incredibly prolific and his Time Patrol universe was one of his more frequent settings. The story in that setting which you're most likely to have encountered in various anthologies is "Delenda Est", a tale where the Roman Empire's rise gets sabotaged by time terrorists and we get a glimpse at an alternate universe where Celtic and Carthaginian influences persist in modern North America.

Time Patrolman was a 1983 volume with two then-new Time Patrol stories.