Sahul continent on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
__NOTOC__
Sahul (), also called Sahul-land, Meganesia, Papualand and Greater Australia, was a
__NOTOC__
Sahul (), also called Sahul-land, Meganesia, Papualand and Greater Australia, was a paleocontinent
A paleocontinent or palaeocontinent is a distinct area of continental crust that existed as a major landmass in the geological past. There have been many different landmasses throughout Earth's time. They range in sizes, some are just a collectio ...
that encompassed the modern-day landmass
A landmass, or land mass, is a large region or area of land. The term is often used to refer to lands surrounded by an ocean or sea, such as a continent or a large island. In the field of geology, a landmass is a defined section of continen ...
es of mainland Australia, Tasmania
)
, nickname =
, image_map = Tasmania in Australia.svg
, map_caption = Location of Tasmania in AustraliaCoordinates:
, subdivision_type = Country
, subdi ...
, New Guinea
New Guinea (; Hiri Motu: ''Niu Gini''; id, Papua, or , historically ) is the world's second-largest island with an area of . Located in Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the island is separated from Australia by the wide Torres ...
, and the Aru Islands.
Sahul was in the south-western Pacific Ocean
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the conti ...
, located appropriately north to south between the Equator
The equator is a circle of latitude, about in circumference, that divides Earth into the Northern and Southern hemispheres. It is an imaginary line located at 0 degrees latitude, halfway between the North and South poles. The term can also ...
and the 44th parallel south
The 44th parallel south is a circle of latitude that is 44 degrees south of the Earth's equatorial plane. It crosses the Atlantic Ocean, the Indian Ocean, Australasia, the Pacific Ocean and South America.
At this latitude the sun is visible f ...
and west to east between the 112th and the 152nd meridians east. Sahul was separated from Sunda to its west by the Wallacean Archipelago. At its largest, when ocean levels were at their lowest, it was approximately in size.
After the last Ice Age global temperatures increased and sea levels gradually rose, flooding the land bridge and separating mainland Australia from New Guinea and Tasmania. New Guinea was separated from the Australian mainland approximately 8,000 years ago, and Tasmania approximately 6,000 years ago.
Sahul hosted a large variety of unique fauna that evolved independently from the rest of the world. Most notably nearly all mammal
Mammals () are a group of vertebrate animals constituting the class Mammalia (), characterized by the presence of mammary glands which in females produce milk for feeding (nursing) their young, a neocortex (a region of the brain), fur ...
s on Sahul were marsupial
Marsupials are any members of the mammalian infraclass Marsupialia. All extant marsupials are endemic to Australasia, Wallacea and the Americas. A distinctive characteristic common to most of these species is that the young are carried in ...
s including a range of browsers, burrowers, scavengers and predator
Predation is a biological interaction where one organism, the predator, kills and eats another organism, its prey. It is one of a family of common feeding behaviours that includes parasitism and micropredation (which usually do not kill t ...
s; bats and rodents represented the only placental mammals.
It is estimated humans first colonised Sahul between 45,000 and 60,000 years ago, making the ocean crossing from Sunda through Wallacea. From Sahul humans spread throughout Oceania
Oceania (, , ) is a geographical region that includes Australasia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia. Spanning the Eastern and Western hemispheres, Oceania is estimated to have a land area of and a population of around 44.5 million ...
.
The name Sahul is used by archeologists, whilst the name Meganesia tends to be used by zoogeographers. The name Greater Australia has been used, but it has been criticised as "cartographic imperialism" because it places greater emphasis upon what is now Australia at the expense of New Guinea.
See also
* *List of paleocontinents
This is a list of paleocontinents, significant landmasses that have been proposed to exist in the geological past. The degree of certainty to which the identified landmasses can regarded as independent entities reduces as geologists look further ba ...
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
* * * * * * * * Australia (continent) Continents Historical continents Oceania Asia-Pacific Pacific Ocean Southern Ocean Indian Ocean {{Geology-stub