Bass Strait Palaeogeography and Shoreline Transgression Rates During Sea-Level Rise

The dataset from the Australian Ocean Data Network presents a palaeogeographic analysis of the Bass Strait land-bridge. It uses high-resolution bathymetry to model landscape change and shoreline transgression during sea-level rise after the Last Ice Age. The study, cited in Quaternary Science Reviews (2025), finds transgression rates exceeding 30 meters per year, which would have drowned 15 km of land within a human lifetime.

Use Cases

• Model past human migration routes based on the reconstructed palaeogeography of the exposed Bass Strait.
• Analyze the impact of rapid shoreline transgression (exceeding 30 m/yr) on prehistoric human populations and settlement patterns.
• Study the timing of human arrival on the land-bridge relative to climate cooling events and its exposure.
• Benchmark land-bridge flooding processes and their effects on biological connectivity in southeastern Australia.

Strengths

• Analysis is based on high-resolution bathymetry data.
• Provides specific transgression rate findings, such as rates exceeding 30 meters per year and 15 km of land lost in a lifetime.
• Research is peer-reviewed and published in Quaternary Science Reviews (Volume 369, 2025).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset scale are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The primary file format is HTML, which may not be a standard data format for direct analysis.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network via data.gov.au

Collection Method

Analysis utilizing high-resolution bathymetry.

Time Range

Covers the period of the Last Ice Age and subsequent sea-level rise.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-27 16:02:08.173104; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Bass Strait, southeastern Australia, separating Tasmania from the mainland.