6 million years ago, something remarkably happened. Somehow the Mediterranean sea got closed off from the Atlantic Ocean. Since you know the sun is shining a lot around the Mediterranean, the water started to evaporate and the whole sea started to dry out..! Since most of the sea water escaped, the remaining water became very salty, and big layers of salt started to fall down on the sea floor. At some places below the Mediterranean sea floor today we find a salt layer of 1 km thick! However, imagine you would take all the salt of the seawater from the Mediterranean of today, and would put it on today’s seafloor, you would only get a layer of ca. 10 meters. So where did the salt came from that formed those other 990 meters? We think it still came from the Atlantic ocean, but only through a very small connection, where this connection was and how it worked I am trying to find out.

What I do is, I look at sandstone and claystone (so very old sand and clay) that got put down in the sea during the time of this whole salt crisis that i described above. I try to see if it maybe got formed in a sea strait (the missing connection?!) and try to see how old these stones are exactly so i can reconstruct how the sea and it’s connections transformed over time.

What I describe above is maybe a typical day. but not the best part of my job. The best part of my work is that I am part of a big research project in which 10 young scientist are involved, all from different countries and working all over Europe. Together we are working on this same question: what did the Mediterranean sea look like 6 million years ago, how did all this salt come on the seafloor, and how did the connection to the Atlantic ocean work that caused that. The difference is that everyone of us has a different approach to the same question. Some use chemistry, some go on fieldwork, some look at fossils, some use computer models.  Throughout the last 2 years we have met up many times to get training, learn from each other, and work together! This way we have not only become friends, we also are team on a mission, in which we try to combine our different specialties and do research together which involves a lot of communication and discussion. So apart from my own every day tasks of data-analysis, reading and writing, I write a lot of email, do skype meetings, fly over to my fellow colleagues and go to conferences and on fieldwork with them. All to make sure we combine forces and tackle this problem together, and I think it is the most special, thrilling and rewarding part of my job

Our team! and a little video about our project