Monday, June 25, 2018

Map: Ice Age Sundaland

During the Last Glacial Maximum, the sea was significantly lower. For the most part, coastlines looked pretty much the same as today, but there were a few places where changing sea levels drastically changed the shape of the land.
Maximilian Dörrbecker via Wikipedia


In Northern Europe, there was Doggerland: rich inhabited land which has since sunken into the North Sea. Fisherman still sometimes dredge up human bones from ancient flooded villages.

And the Bering Strait was instead the Bering land bridge, which is how which allowed humans to migrate to the Americas.

But the biggest change was in Sundaland, a region of southeast Asia including Borneo, Java, and 
the Malay peninsula. 

For fun, I took a map of Sundaland generated by Dhani Irwanto and used it as a base to draw a fantasy lookin' map.  I also flipped it so that South is at the top of the image. Why not?


There's a lot of cool stuff about Sundaland. A nearly enclosed sea, massive amounts of wet and fertile lowlands. There's the scary desert continent of Sahul nearby.

Other maps of the ice age world.

v7x - Realistic Renders
Altitude map from the NOAA. 
Ice age vegetation patterns - a larger version of the maps from this research.
Maps with varying sea levels.

No comments:

Post a Comment