The single "raison d'être" for selecting Site 126 was to explore the pre-evaporite history of the eastern Mediterranean and hopefully to establish the paleoenvironment which preceded the Late Miocene salinity crisis. The selcetd site is in a deep cleft in the Mediterranean Ridge in the central Ionian Sea, a cleft that cuts more than 250 meters below the level of Horizon M and at the same time is floored by flat-lying sediments. A secondary objective of the cleft site-selection was to ascertain what kind of sediment makes up the horizontal fill and hopefully to determine some details of the history and mechanics of the depression-filling process
