MEDMESS: Quantifying Mediterranean environmental change during the Messinian Salinity Crisis

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Severe drought periods culminate in extreme water deficiency and ultimately salinity crises. MEDMESS will reconstruct the amplitude and rate of long-term change in the hydrological budget of the Mediterranean system during the prelude, inception and evolution of one of the environmental events marking Europe during the past 10 Ma: the Messinian Salinity Crisis (MSC). During this event the Mediterranean was cut off from the open ocean resulting in impressive sea level oscillations (>1000 m), destruction of ecosystems and deposition of giant (up to 1000 m) evaporites.Here, I propose to apply biomarker-based organic geochemistry to quantify environmental change in the Mediterranean during the MSC focusing on mean air temperature (Goal 1), Mediterranean Sea surface temperature (Goal 2) and changes in the Mediterranean water budget (Goal 3). Collectively, these data sets have the potential to elucidate differences in Land-Sea temperature and regional water budget. This proposal develops a largely untested and novel idea: Combining land and sea temperature data as well as coeval hydrogen isotope records to understand regional rainfall and runoff/evaporation patterns.MEDMESS intends to support IMMAGE, an amphibious ICDP-IODP drilling project. The proposed MEDMESS project will focus on the western Mediterranean - location coinciding with the prospected region for the IMMAGE ICDP drill sites. Dr. Flecker and members of IMMAGE consortium support this application and envision collaboration in the future.MEDMESS will deliver innovative proxy data for a quantitative understanding of the impact of large inland water bodies on regional climate with focus on extreme hydrological changes occurring on the way into and the way out of salinity crises. The added knowledge can subsequently be extended to less sensitive settings of the past as well as to future analogous regions on Earth.