Akrotiri was once an island off Cyprus, and its salt lake an arm of the sea, NASA says

The Akrotiri Peninsula, below Limassol, began as a separate island, and its salt lake was once open water of the Mediterranean, NASA's Earth Observatory explained on 5 November in its Image of the Day. Its Landsat 8 picture of 10 October 2026 shows autumn rains starting to fill the lake.

In NASA's account, the smaller island rose from Miocene chalk, limestone and marl. Sediment from rivers and the sea then built two tombolos, bars of sand and gravel. The western one, laid down by the Kouris, the river below Kourion, came first, about 50,000 years ago.

The eastern bar is far younger. From cores drilled through the lake bed, Miltiadis Polidorou and colleagues trace an open bay turning into a semi-closed lagoon about 4,000 years ago and into a restricted lagoon about 2,000 years ago, as a spit from the north-east lengthened into a narrow tombolo. Storms could still drive the sea over it; the bar widened into a full barrier over the last two millennia [1, pp. 13–14].

People used the peninsula long before. The rock shelter of Akrotiri-Aetokremnos, dug by Alan H. Simmons from 1987, holds traces of visits some 12,000 years old beside the bones of dwarf hippos; the shore near it at that time is uncertain. At Dreamer's Bay, a survey led by John R. Leonard from 1989 recorded a breakwater and warehouse foundations of a port he dated from Hellenistic to Late Roman times.