500,000 people may have lived in a large submerged area near Australia

As many as 500,000 people may have once lived on land in what is now northern Australia, which was submerged by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age.

Kasi Norman Professors at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, have reconstructed the topography of the approximately 400,000 square kilometers of land currently covered by the Indian Ocean, known as the North-West Shelf. The researchers say this is not an uninhabitable place as previously thought, but rather a place where people have thrived for tens of thousands of years.

The study revealed features such as inland seas as large as the Sea of ​​Marmara in Turkey and vast freshwater lakes with gorges, rivers and cliffs, such as those currently found in Kakadu National Park in Australia's Northern Territory. became.

Mr Norman said this large area of ​​flooded land had long been known from oil and gas exploration, but the Australian Institute of Geosciences recently released detailed sonar data with pixels down to 30 x 30 metres. It is said that he did. “This is high enough resolution to tell us about landscape features that are important to people,” she says.

Research has revealed that the inland sea existed in a stable form from 27,000 to 17,000 years ago. A nearby 2,000 square kilometer freshwater lake remained stable from 30,000 to 14,000 years ago. The lake is thought to have been an important refuge for people fleeing south from the arid Australian continent during the Ice Age.

By modeling these geographic features, the researchers estimate that the area could have supported a population of 50,000 to 500,000 people.

“This vast landscape that no longer exists would have been very different from what we see in Australia today,” Norman said. “It's incredible to have a freshwater lake of this size next to an inland sea, and people would have lived on the other side of that lake. This is a lost landscape that people were using. is.”

However, at the end of the last ice age, sea levels began to rise dramatically. Initially, sea levels rose at about 1 meter per 100 years, Norman said, but from 14,500 to 14,100 years ago, the rate increased to 400 to 500 meters per 100 years.

If things had continued, people would have seen sea levels rise and be forced to move inland to escape flooding.

He said the region had never before modeled how many people it supported. peter bess The research, from the University of Western Australia, was made possible thanks to new detailed paleogeographical data available to the team.