Avant-propos : L’événement Messinien…trente ans après
Résumé
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?”.