When You Could Walk from Malta to Sicily: The Ice Age Land Bridge That Vanished

Stand on the Dingli Cliffs today. Nothing but blue water toward Africa.

Twenty thousand years ago, the sea was gone from this coast. The Malta Plateau was emergent — a continuous limestone plain, 40 kilometres wide, stretching 90 kilometres north to southeast Sicily. Not a narrow causeway. An entire landscape.

Dwarf elephants roamed it. Deer crossed it. Wolves hunted on it.

Then the ice melted, the seas rose, and it vanished.

Born on the Seafloor

How 30 million years of marine snow built an archipelago

Every cliff face in Malta is a library. The honey-coloured Globigerina limestone that gives Valletta its glow? Microscopic shells of planktonic foraminifera (single-celled marine organisms). Drifting down through warm Miocene seas. Millions of years of marine snow, compacted into building stone.

The hard grey Lower Coralline Limestone at the base of Dingli’s cliffs is older still. Late Oligocene. Roughly 28 to 23 million years ago.

— Malta sits on the African Plate, not the European Plate. —

Here’s what most accounts skip entirely: Malta is part of the Pelagian Block, a continental platform on the African Plate. It sits between Sicily and Libya, about 200 km south of where the African Plate dives beneath the Eurasian Plate.

While mountain belts were being thrust skyward to the north, Malta’s corner of Africa was quietly accumulating sediment in shallow, sun-drenched waters.

That last detail matters. Malta is one of very few places in the Mediterranean where you can see a stratigraphically complete and unusually legible Oligo-Miocene sedimentary succession standing above sea level.

The Maltese Lower Globigerina Limestone is so significant that the International Union of Geological Sciences designated it a Global Heritage Stone Resource in 2019. One of only a handful of rocks in the world with that recognition.

Cracked and Tilted

The faults that carved the islands into existence

Sedimentation wrote Malta’s pages. Tectonics ripped out a few chapters.

Two perpendicular fault systems sliced the archipelago into its current shape. Understanding them explains almost everything about Malta’s landscape — including why the megalithic temples sit where they do.

Fault System #1: The Old Set (ENE–WSW)

Dating to the Early Miocene, striking 50° to 70°. These created Malta’s miniature basin-and-range landscape: alternating raised horst blocks (uplifted slabs) and dropped graben troughs (down-faulted basins).

The results: the South Malta Horst, the North Malta Graben, and the Gozo Horst. The Great Fault — with vertical displacement exceeding 100 metres — runs right through the island.

Fault System #2: The Young Set (NW–SE)

Active from the Late Miocene onward, nearly perpendicular to the older set. Associated with the Pantelleria Rift, whose trough drops to 1,300–1,700 metres just south of the islands — far beyond the lonely islet of Filfla.

Instrumental seismicity indicates the region remains tectonically active.

There’s also an underappreciated wildcard: salt tectonics. Gravity surveys reveal kilometre-wide circular domes and depressions across Malta that don’t match the known fault patterns. They’re likely caused by halokinesis (slow flow of buried salt deposits). Still an active area of research.

The Great Drying

Setting the stage for the land bridge

Before the ice ages, Malta witnessed one of Earth’s most extraordinary geological events: the Messinian Salinity Crisis (5.96 to 5.33 million years ago).

The Mediterranean lost its Atlantic connection. Evaporation ran wild. Sea levels in the basin may have plummeted by more than a thousand metres in the deepest areas.

For the Malta Plateau, this created a deeply eroded surface that became a crucial stratigraphic marker. When Rossi’s team analysed their seismic profiles, this irregular Messinian erosional surface was the boundary between the older Oligo-Miocene rocks and the younger Plio-Quaternary deposits sitting on top.

Walking to Sicily

The Last Glacial Maximum land bridge in unprecedented detail

During the Last Glacial Maximum (roughly 26,500 to 19,000 years ago), ice sheets locked up so much water that global sea levels dropped 120–130 metres.

In most places, this exposed a fringe of continental shelf. In the Sicily Channel, it did something far more dramatic.

All of Malta’s islands fused into a single landmass — Malta, Gozo, Comino — and that combined island fused to southeast Sicily. The channels between the islands became shallow valleys, probably carrying seasonal streams.

What the Bridge Actually Looked Like

This is where the Rossi et al. (2025) study makes its biggest contribution.

Using 2D multichannel seismic profiles (a geophysical method that images subsurface rock using sound waves) from old oil exploration surveys, combined with EMODnet (European Marine Observation and Data Network) bathymetric data, the team reconstructed the western coastline of the land bridge in detail for the first time.

The western shoreline sat at depths of 119 to 131 metres below present sea level (all depths are present-day water depth below modern sea level).

— The western edge featured barrier islands and coastal lagoons — not a bare cliff dropping into the sea. —

Structural highs in the underlying rock acted as natural barriers, with younger sediments lapping against them (a geometry geologists call onlap). Behind these low chains of carbonate highs, sheltered lagoons developed — biologically productive shallow-water environments, ecologically distinct from the exposed limestone steppe further inland.

The Megafauna Highway

Dwarf elephants, giant dormice, and the bones that proved the bridge existed

The most charismatic evidence comes from Għar Dalam cave on Malta’s southeast coast.

Its stratigraphy reads like a compressed history of the island (layer ages are approximate and depend on dating method and calibration):

Elsewhere on Malta: Latnija Cave in Mellieħa preserves Mesolithic hunter-gatherer occupation dating to around ~8,500 years ago — roughly a millennium before the first Neolithic farmers. Evidence published in Nature (Scerri et al., 2025) indicates these early visitors crossed around 100 km of open water, likely in simple craft such as dugout canoes. Published analysis describes these as the longest currently known hunter-gatherer sea crossings in the Mediterranean, and among the earliest evidence of hunter-gatherer long-distance seafaring before sails.

The Dog-Sized Elephant

The elephant story is far more complex than most accounts let on. At least three species of Palaeoloxodon are recognised from Malta, representing multiple colonisation events over hundreds of thousands of years.

Palaeoloxodon falconeri stood less than a metre tall. Roughly the size of a large dog.

But here’s the part nobody tells you: despite their tiny size, they kept the life history of full-sized elephants.

The larger species, P. mnaidriensis, arrived ~200,000 years ago and was bigger than P. falconeri. Why? Predators had arrived too — cave hyenas, cave lions, wolves, bears had crossed the Strait of Messina. Bigger body = better survival odds.

The Timing Problem

Note: this is the Calabria–Sicily crossing at Messina, separate from the Malta Plateau land bridge further south.

The Strait of Messina (currently ~3–5 km wide) sits over a sill at about 81 metres depth. During the LGM, it became dry land for centuries to possibly over a millennium, centred around 21,500 to 20,000 years ago (estimates vary with the sea-level curve used).

For the first time in hundreds of thousands of years: a potentially continuous terrestrial corridor from continental Europe through Sicily to Malta, depending on sea level and local sill geometry. Even with low sea level, whether the full corridor was walkable at any given moment depends on local sill depths and short-term sea-level oscillations.

But here’s the twist. The last known Sicilian elephants are often placed around ~32,000 years ago (Masseti, 2001) — before the LGM bridge fully formed. By the time the corridor opened wide, it was deer and cattle walking to Malta, not elephants.

The Drowning

How rising seas erased a country-sized landmass

Not a catastrophe. A slow drowning.

After ~18,000 years ago, melting ice sheets sent sea levels climbing. Not at a constant rate — pulses of rapid rise alternated with periods of stability — but the trend was relentlessly upward.

On a low-gradient shelf like the Malta Plateau, even small sea-level changes meant enormous horizontal shifts in the shoreline.

But the submergence didn’t stop. Malta’s coasts show evidence of ongoing subsidence — the islands are gently sinking as well as being flooded by rising seas. A double whammy that’s been reshaping the shoreline for millennia.

What Lies Beneath

The submerged landscape is a time capsule

The drowned land bridge isn’t featureless seabed.

Surveys have revealed submerged river channels, alluvial deposits, and former woodland habitats. The Malta Plateau — lacking significant river input — formed distinctive tide-wave bedforms instead of the typical sediment wedges found on other Mediterranean shelves. For more on Malta’s relationship with water through the ages, see our guide to Malta’s water history.

— We still don’t know whether humans used the land bridge before it drowned. —

Homo sapiens reached Sicily by at least 20,000 years ago. The land bridge was still crossable until ~14,000 years ago. A 2025 Nature paper (Scerri et al.) proved that hunter-gatherers reached Malta by sea ~8,500 years ago — crossing 100 km of open water, likely in simple craft such as dugout canoes. Neolithic farmers followed ~7,500 years ago — the same people who would eventually build the megalithic temples.

But what happened between 14,000 and 8,500 years ago remains blank. Did anyone walk the bridge before it drowned? Did earlier seafarers visit and leave no trace? The evidence, if it exists, is underwater — perhaps alongside the shipwrecks that already draw divers to Malta’s depths.

The Malta Plateau, with its thin sediment cover and relatively gentle disturbance, may be one of the better-preserved submerged prehistoric landscapes in the Mediterranean. Investigating it will require high-resolution geophysical surveys, targeted coring, and potentially underwater archaeology. Expensive. Technically demanding. Potentially transformative.

From Papers to Tourism

Why this matters for anyone visiting Malta

Cappadonia et al. (2018) argued that the shared geology between Malta and Sicily should become a cross-border geosite network.

Their insight: the Miocene–Pliocene stratigraphy of both regions is continuous. Same formations, same seas, now separated by the water that re-flooded the plateau. Visiting Globigerina Limestone in Valletta and equivalent units in Sicily’s Hyblean Plateau is visiting two parts of the same outcrop.

For a destination already attracting deep-history visitors (Megalithic Temples, Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum), the land bridge narrative extends Malta’s story from 5,000 years to 500,000 years and beyond.

Continental drift. Climate change. Evolution. Extinction. The fundamental impermanence of geography.

All told through rocks you can touch and caves you can walk into. For the full sweep of Malta’s history — from these geological origins through Phoenician traders, the Great Siege, and beyond — explore our Malta History Timeline.

What We Still Don’t Know

• The eastern coastline of the LGM land bridge is essentially unmapped at high resolution
• The precise timing of the bridge’s final severance is constrained only within a few-thousand-year window
• We know almost nothing about the vegetation that covered the exposed plateau
• Whether humans used the land bridge before it drowned (~14 ka) — the gap between bridge submergence and earliest known human presence (~8.5 ka) is still unexplained
• Salt-tectonic anomalies visible in gravity surveys need follow-up investigation
• Ongoing seismicity at fault intersections has unexplored hazard implications

Most of this uncertainty exists because we are reconstructing a drowned landscape from indirect geophysics plus sparse cores — the direct evidence is 50 to 130 metres underwater.

We now know people reached Malta by sea ~8,500 years ago, and farmers by ~7,500 years ago. But the bridge was crossable until ~14,000 years ago. That’s a 5,500-year gap between the bridge drowning and the earliest known human presence — still wide open.

Glossary

Key Research & Further Reading

Rossi et al. (received 2024; published 2025) — Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, DOI: 10.1002/esp.6061. First detailed LGM western coastline reconstruction using repurposed oil-exploration seismic data. The barrier-lagoon discovery.

Scerri et al. (2025) — Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08780-y. Hunter-gatherer sea voyages extended to remotest Mediterranean islands. The Latnija Cave discovery pushing Malta’s human history back to ~8,500 years ago.

Cappadonia et al. (2018) — Geosciences 8(7), 253. Cross-border geosite network proposal based on shared stratigraphy.

Alexander (1988) — Quaternary Science Reviews 7(1), 41–53. Foundational paper on Malta’s tectonics, faunal evidence, and Quaternary subsidence.

Todaro et al. (2022) — Marine Geology. Distinctive tide-wave bedforms on the Malta Plateau during the LGM.

Furlani et al. (2013) — Holocene sea level change and evidence of ongoing Quaternary subsidence beyond global eustatic change.

Foglini et al. (2016) — Combined multibeam/LiDAR/Chirp paleolandscape reconstruction from LGM to present.

Köhler et al. (2021) — Scientific Reports 11: 22862, DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-02192-4. Palaeohistology reveals a slow pace of life for the dwarfed Sicilian elephant. Source for maturity ~15 years and minimum lifespan 68 years.

Masseti (2001) — In The World of Elephants — Proceedings of the 1st International Congress, Rome. Holocene and Late Pleistocene Sicilian elephant extinction chronology.

IUGS Geoheritage (2019) — Global Heritage Stone Resource designation for Maltese Lower Globigerina Limestone.

The land bridge is gone. Dissolved back into the sea that made the limestone it was built from. But its traces are everywhere — in the bones at Għar Dalam, in the hearths at Latnija, in the faults that carve the landscape, in the seismic echoes bouncing off drowned lagoon barriers 119–131 metres below the surface.

Malta is a small island. Its geological story is immense. And it’s still being written.

— ManicMalta.com