Bass Strait Land-Bridge Palaeogeography with High-Resolution Bathymetry

High-resolution bathymetry data was used to model landscape change during the flooding of the Bass Strait land-bridge after the Last Ice Age. The analysis, published in Quaternary Science Reviews in 2025, found shoreline transgression rates could exceed 30 meters per year, drowning 15 km of land within a human lifetime. This dataset provides a benchmark for understanding land-bridge flooding and its impact on human migrations in southeastern Australia.

Use Cases

• Modeling past shoreline transgression rates based on high-resolution bathymetry
• Analyzing the impact of rapid sea-level rise on human movement and residency patterns
• Reconstructing the palaeogeography of exposed land-bridges for archaeological site prediction
• Benchmarking land-bridge flooding timelines against climate cooling events

Strengths

• Analysis is based on high-resolution bathymetry data.
• Published in a peer-reviewed journal (Quaternary Science Reviews, 2025).
• Provides specific quantitative findings, such as transgression rates exceeding 30 m/yr.

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.
• Data may reflect geographic bias focused on the Bass Strait region.

Provenance

Source

Australian Ocean Data Network

Collection Method

Utilizes high-resolution bathymetry for landscape change analysis.

Time Range

Covers the period from the Last Ice Age to the flooding of the Bass Strait.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-10 19:14:14.897962; freshness should be verified.

Geography

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