Sicily and Malta were once united: the study that reveals the submerged land bridge

Once upon a time, Sicily and Malta were united and you could move from one island to the other on foot. This was revealed by a study published in Nature, according to which over 13,000 years ago a vast strip of land would have connected the two islands in the Mediterranean, allowing men and animals to travel the distance between the two lands, which today are over 90 kilometers apart. Over the centuries, the rise in sea levels has submerged this natural "corridor". The research, conducted by the Institute of Marine Sciences of the CNR (Cnr-Ismar), by the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS) and by the University of Malta, has made it possible to reconstruct the morphology and subsequent disappearance of this strip of land.

The study

The team of researchers, led by marine geologists Maria Filomena Loreto and Emanuele Lodolo, traveled the Strait of Sicily scanning the seabed with advanced acoustic equipment between 2025 and 2026. The analyzes revealed that the ancient "corridor" was a real archipelago, with elongated and discontinuous rocky ridges tens of kilometers long. In addition to the depressions and basins, the researchers also documented the presence of an irregular formation, which may have been a coral reef in ancient times, but further investigations will be necessary to establish its origin. As Arkeonews specifies, citing the study, it would have been a "varied coastal environment, with high ridges, flat areas and sheltered basins": a landscape that "could have offered different habitats as the climate and coastline varied".

The “land bridge”

But how did this “land bridge” appear? As scientists explain, quoted again by Arkeonews, during the last ice age the enormous ice sheets trapped large quantities of water, lowering global sea levels by around 130 metres. As the Mediterranean receded, a strip of land emerged between Sicily and Malta, creating a “natural connection that remained essentially unbroken for thousands of years.” Then, with the end of the last ice age, the melting of the glaciers led to a rise in sea levels which slowly submerged the corridor. About 13,000 years ago, the earth connection was already gone.