The Asia connection

Oliver recalled that in my earlier entry about a speculation that islands may someday be sumberged relative to the continuous rising sea level, I was musing about the theory that the Philippine archipelago was connected to the Asian mainland millions of years ago. He sent me a link to a project of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory of the Natural Environment Reserach Council (NERC) of the United Kingdom. The aim of the project is "to illustrate the changes in the Earth's shorelines during the past 20 kyr caused by the deglaciation of the Late Pleistocene ice sheets."

According to its calculations, the Philippines was connected to the island of Borneo which, in turn, was connected to mainland Asian as late as 20,000 years ago. In fact, if you look at the map, Asia was a much, much bigger land mass 20,000 years ago.

Nakaka-bitin. What if the calculations were extended to a hundred thousand ears ago...?

Anyway, perhaps some other future project will tell us more.

Thanks for the link, Oliver.