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To: blam
You need access through a university server to get this but it looked interesting:

Special Paper 2: Maps of Pleistocene Sea Levels in Southeast Asia: Shorelines, River Systems and Time Durations
Harold K. Voris
Journal of Biogeography, 1153-1167, Vol. 27, No. 5, Sep., 2000


A table shows the percentages of time and number of years that sea level was below current level in intervals of 10 meters up to 120 meters for each of three periods of time: the past 17,000 years, the past 150,000 years, and the past 250,000 years, as well as the number of events that resulted in the lowering of the sea level to that particular depth. For the past 17,000 years, there was 1 event and the amount of time that sea level was lowered 120 meters below current level was 1000 years or 2% of the time, 100 meters, 4000 years or 24% of the time.

Here is an interesting part from the discussion section:
At 120m BPL (fig. 1a, C 17,000 yr BP), the bulk of the Sunda and Sahul shelves were largely exposed and formed massive lowland connections between present day islands in this regions and adjacent continents. Sumatra, Java and Borneo are connected by the exposed Sunda Shelf. If one considers new continuous shelf exposed south and east of the Isthmus of Kra, an additional 1.53 million sq km of land was annexed to Southeast Asia. This area is three-fouths the present day combined area of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, the Malay Peninsula and Singapore (2.07 million sq km) (Webster's, 19980). At 120 m BL, the total newly connected area of the Sunda Shelf (in Sumatra, Java and Borneo) exceeded 3.2 million sq km, thus increasing the contiguous area of Indo-China by about 1.5 times. In addition, the islands of Hainan and Taiwan were connected to mainland China, and Sri Lanka was connect with India. Natuna Island and the other smaller island of today's South China Sea (e.g. Anambas Islands and Tambelan Archipelago) were a part of the exposed Sunda Shelf and likely offered some significant topographic relief. Although Borneo and Palawan were not connected by a land bridge at 17,000 yr BP, the Balabac Straits were reduced to a width of only about 12 km. Sulawesi remained separated from Borneo by a narrow but very deep ocean trench. To the east the exposed Sahul Shelf broadly connected Australia and New Guinea and surround the Aru Islands.

At 100m and 75m BPL (Fig. 1b, c, c. 15m000 and 13,000 yr BP), the configuration of the exposed Sunda and Sahul shelves remained very similar to the 120 m BPL arraangement and no major land connections were lost. At 75 m BLP (Fig. 1c), it is likely that one or more freshwater lakes or swamps existed at various times in depression where the Gulf of Siam is now located (Emery & Nino, 1963) and bottom cores taken off the east coast of the Malay Peninsula contained peat deposits indicating a Pleistocene peat swamp (Biswas, 1973). Furthermore, evidence of old coast lines support the presence of a brackish waster lake in the Gulf of Capentaria at about 60 m BPL (Torgensen et al,. 1985).

At 50 m BPL (Fig. 1d, c. 11,000 yr BP), extensive land bridges still connected the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java and Borneo.
Freepmail me about this paper.
74 posted on 03/26/2011 1:27:37 PM PDT by aruanan
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To: aruanan

Thanks. I’ll review it later.


75 posted on 03/26/2011 2:24:39 PM PDT by blam
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