Nire Bryce

About six million years ago, the Straights of Gibraltar were somehow obstructed and, without fresh water from the Atlantic, most-to-all of the Mediterranean Sea dried out. The megaflood that followed carved the Straights into their current form, and likely flowed through that chokepoint at a rate of about 1,000 times that of the modern Amazon river. Some areas of the dried seabed may have seen water levels rising by as much as 10 meters a day during parts of this catastrophic refilling.

the Saturn V main engines, were the water sprayers to fail, would be able to melt concrete and even granite with just the energy from the sound.

Having been educated in New York public schools, I believe that I'm required by my fancy-pants high school diploma (for having passed minimum competency tests, you see, back when those tests were still new) to supply the fact that Long Island - the thing that looks like a fish-kaiju about to eat Manhattan, and where I coincidentally live - was part of the southern boundary of the last batch of glaciers to escape the Arctic Circle, basically the equivalent of dumping out the dust pan after sweeping out Massachusetts and Connecticut. Because of how things get caught up in ice that I don't really remember after all these years, the southern half of the island is basically all sand, and the northern half is hilly and rocky.

Supplemental history: The north wasn't actually as rocky as it looks today. The settlers' shipping ports all went along the north shore, and the ships would arrive weighed down with stone, which they left behind when they took on cargo, so we end up with random basalt boulders on people's lawns, even though that makes no geological sense.