Foreword

The evaporitic Messinian event constitutes, for about thirty years, what Busson (1990) named one of the main problems of sedimentary geology. The “Giant messinian Salt Deposit” (Hsü 1972; Busson 1979), according to its phenomenal thickness and extension, fascinates the sedimentologists and the geomorphologists and constitutes at the scale of the Mediterrannean a problem as disputed as the K/T crisis explanation. Indeed, the Messinian and K/T crises share the same fullness of questioning and uncertainty, especially regarding the questions “Why?”, “How?” and “When?”.