An international team of geologists has discovered a massive ancient freshwater pool deep in the Iblean Mountains on the Italian island of Sicily. The estimated age of the underground reservoir is approximately 6 million years. The study was published in the scientific journal magazine Contact Earth and Environment (CEE).
Scientists analyzed maps from previous expeditions searching for oil fields. Instead of oil, they found evidence of an aquifer containing about 17.5 cubic kilometers, slightly less than the volume of Lake Tanganyika, the world’s third largest body of fresh water.
The scientific team suggests that this amount of fluid, which accumulated underground after the Strait of Gibraltar 6 million years ago, was blocked for the next 700 thousand years, causing the Mediterranean to partially dry out. Over thousands of years, rainwater seeped into the earth’s crust from the shallow bottom, where it was absorbed by rocks. When sea levels returned to normal, groundwater freshwater was shut off due to seawater pressure.
Previous scientists discovered A huge freshwater “lake” deep in New Zealand.