Sunda (geology)

Card with Sahul and Sunda

The Sunda or Sundaland is a contiguous land mass that existed during the last glacial period . At that time, the sea ​​level was lower than it is today, so that today's islands of Borneo , Sumatra , Java , Palawan and other smaller islands in Southeast Asia, along with India in the east , were part of the Asian continent. Today the low-lying land areas of that time are a continental shelf covered by seas, such as the approximately 80 m deep Java Sea .

At that time, the contiguous land mass of Sahul, which no longer exists, was south-east of Sunda . Both land masses were only separated from each other by narrow straits, so that, for example, people could cross them by boat. The Wallace Line also runs in the southeast, indicating the biogeographical transition zone between Asian and Australian flora and fauna.

Web links

• fieldmuseum.org: Maps: How the region has looked over the past millennia. ( Memento from March 17, 2009 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hermann Parzinger, The Children of Prometheus , Munich 2014, p. 94