These guys were a few hundred thousand years too early, hence my boat suggestion — but I remembered your interest in the Messinian Salinity Crisis.
Mediterranean Sea filled in less than two years: study [Zanclean flood]
December 9, 2009
https://phys.org/news/2009-12-mediterranean-sea-years.html
""The Atlantic waters found a way through the present Gibraltar Strait and rapidly refilled the Mediterranean 5.33 million years ago in an event known as the Zanclean flood," it said.
I've always suspected similar to this happened during the last Ice Age.