Just curious, I’ve never seen any indication that Australia was ever affected by an ice age. But I don’t really know, one way or another. Anybody out there know anything?
The biggest difference was that you could have walked to what became Papua New Guinea and Tasmania.
Though I don’t hear anyone complaining about the global warming that wiped out all that land, and when sea levels rose about 300 feet.
If you look up the farthest reach of the ice sheets in the northern hemisphere during previous ice ages, they never got farther south than about 39 degrees north latitude. It just so happens that the southernmost point of Australia is also about 39 degrees from the equator. So if ice sheets were of equal extent in the southern hemisphere, they would not have covered any significant amount of land in Australia.
The past few million years were notable for the Quarternary ice age. There were many glacial and interglacial periods (over 20) during this time, the last glacial about 20,000 years ago. In Tasmania there is evidence of three different glaciations-the last glaciation, one sometime in the Quaternary, and one in the Tertiary. In mainland Australia, there is evidence of only the last glaciation, and the ice then covered only 25 square kilometres, in the vicinity of Mt Kosciuszko...
I saw a tv show on that yesterday. Australia generally got drier and wetter with the coming and going of the ice ages in the north. The map I saw did show a section in the south east corner of the continent that did experience some glaciation. the show I saw yesterday discussed the demise of the megafauna in australia about 46000 years ago. the question was why did they die — given that there had been many periods of wet and dry before that they survived. they weren’t definitive but its thought that perhaps habitat loss—during a dry spell— brought on by slash and burn techniques of the recent arrivals the aborigines—may have tipped the balance.