What climate would a dry Mediterranean have

Factual Questions
1

If the Zanclean flood had never happened, and the Mediterranean were dry, what would its climate be like? The Mediterranean basin’s average altitude is -4900 feet, and it’s lowest altitude lower than -17000 feet. Would those extreme depths cause the temperature to soar at that altitude?

2

Would that really be the state of the region if not for the flood? I assume you are asking a hypothetical about the current geography being suddenly devoid of water, but I am curious if that would really be the state of things if Gibraltar had never been breached. Rivers feeding the region may have been insufficient to compete with evaporation to fill the area, but they might have raised the altitude with silt deposits over millions of years.

3

Branching from the OP’s link, is this discussion of climate prior to the flood. I would guess it would have continued that way.

4

Thanks, I totally missed that in the Messinian Crisis article. 176F! Holy cow!

5

Yeah, but it’s a dry heat.

6

I’m not convinced it’s possible to answer the question. A dry Mediterranean would affect the climate of all the surrounding areas, and in fact the entire planet.

7

There’s a good Harry Turtledove novella called Down In the Bottomlands set in an alternate-universe dry Med. He has it as a hot desert (which, given the prevalance of all the evaporites in the Med basin, seems about right)

8

I imagine that basin would take in a huge amount of air, but would it have been enough to have any effect on the average air pressure planet-wide or is that still just a tiny drop in the atmospheric ocean?

9

As I recall, it’s virtually uninhabitable by humans, though still highly valuable, both for its mineral resources and its unique ecosystem.

10

Yes, it’s basically a desert nature reserve, Trench Park.
It’s economically valuable because the incised rivers leading into it provide hydropower to the Europeans.
It also serves as a buffer between two polities, the neanderthal Europeans and the sapiens Africans.

Overall, I thought Turtledove did a good job of extrapolating a likely setting based on actual projections on what a dry Med might be like..