Translations:WikiArS/Case studies/3/en

Pau Bahí, a Llotja student on internship at Amical Wikimedia during the 2011-2012 academic year, undertook the challenge of representing this process. He was advised by Daniel Garcia-Castellanos, researcher at the Jaume Almera Institute for Earth Sciences (ICTJA-CSIC) and member of Wikimedia España, who provided documentation and corrected and validated the images before they were published. Pau created a series of four images that illustrated the channels that existed prior to the isolation of the Mediterranean (7 mya), the uplifting of Gibraltar and the disappearance of all but one of the channels (6 mya), the complete isolation and desiccation by evaporation of the Mediterranean (5.6 mya), and the re-flooding of the basin (5.3 mya). Letters were superimposed on two of the images, thereby allowing the encyclopedia article or figure caption to make reference to specific parts of the image. To facilitate understanding of the event, Pau included insets in the upper right-hand corner of three of the images of the Mediterranean basin. One of these insets shows what happened under the earth's crust to cause the Mediterranean basin to rise 6 mya: as a portion of the lithosphere dropped down into the mantle, extremely molten magma rose through the cracks in the crust. Another inset shows what the desiccated Mediterranean basin would have looked like, with gerbils and camelids crossing from Africa to the European continent. Pau conducted research and consulted with paleontologists in order to draw these animals. The third inset is meant to complement the bird's eye view of the larger image. Drawn from a lower vantage point, the image shows water cascading through the Strait of Gibraltar on its way to the Strait of Sicily. After the images were validated, Pau uploaded them to Wikimedia Commons and made them freely available with a copyleft license. They are now used on Wikipedia in several languages.