1. GEOGRAPHICAL HISTORY OF AUSTRALIA WRITTEN BY CAITLIN WENDT

2. CONTENTS Formation of the world through the agesPage 3 Timeline of evolution of animals and humansPage 4 The Great Barrier ReefPage 5 - 10 The Inland Seas Page 11 – 15 References Page 16

3. The continents of the world have not always been as they are presently.  Image1 shows that at the time of the formation of the world, 458 millions years ago, many of the continents were joined.  Image 2 shows when and how countries broke away from each other, forming the present day continents. Image 1 Image 2

4. These images show a timeline for the evolution of animals and humans from the formation of the world to present day.

7. We conducted an experiment showing how the Great Barrier Reef was formed. This image show that Australia was once a much larger continent. This image shows how, as sea levels rose, land around the coastal area of Australia was flooded. In particular along the North Eastern coast of Australia, where the Great Barrier Reef was created. This image shows the present day Australian coastline, with the Great Barrier Reef drowned by the sea. Sea levels have risen about 120 meters since the last ice age.

8. Formation of the Great Barrier Reef Around Australia, at the coldest time of the last ice age about 20,000 years ago, sea level stood about 120 metres below its present level. When the last ice age began to end, a few thousand years later, huge masses of ice that had built up on the land, particularly in the norther hemisphere, began melting. Water poured into the world’s oceans, raising their levels. By about 13,000 years ago, sea level had risen to around 70 metres below its present level. About 10,000 years ago it started flooding large areas of coastal plain and wetlands. The shallow waters encouraged the growth and proliferation of corals along the vast stretch of the Queensland coast forming the Great Barrier Reef. Dreamtime stories tell of sea level rise Human occupation in Australia dates back to perhaps more than 50,000 years. Gimuy Walubara Yidinji people of the Cairns area have dwelt alongside the reef for thousands of years, and many of their traditions hark back to those ancient times. They dance and sing dreamtime stories which explains this change in sea level. These stories have been passed down from generation to generation for some 300 generations. They witnessed first hand the sea level rise which flooded the coast line from about 13,400–7,500 years ago. Researchers have found other stories from all over Australia that mirror how the landscape dramatically changed towards the end of the last ice age. The researchers now believe that these stories could be some of the oldest accurate spoken histories in the world. The finding is remarkable as many anthropologists believe that exaggeration and Chinese whispers often distort oral history so severely that they can no longer be reliable if they are older than 1,000 years old. The rise of sea level since the last ice age occurred not just around Australia but around the world, which means we might expect to find similar stores from all parts of the globe, but we do not. The isolation of Australia is likely to be part of the answer. But it could also be due to the way that Aboriginal story-telling gives value to preserving information and using kin-based systems for sharing knowledge, where older people in a tribe were given the task of teaching the younger people.

10. Dr Nick Reid, a linguist at the University of New England, has found that the stories of Australian Aborigines are astoundingly accurate. Dr Reid studied 18 traditional aboriginal stories and found that they seemed to coincide with true geological events. Writing for the conversation, he said: 'how do we know that these stories are authentic? We suggest that because they all say essentially the same thing, it is more likely that they are based on observation.conversation 'All tell of the ocean rising over areas that had previously been dry. None tell stories running the other way – of seas falling to expose land. 'The huge distances separating the places from which the stories were collected – as well as their unique, local contexts – makes it unlikely that they derived from a common source that was invented.‘ Published: 23:50 est, 28 January 2015 | By RICHARD GRAY FOR MAILONLINERICHARD GRAY FOR MAILONLINE

12. Cretaceous Australia - 144 - 65.4 million years ago  The cretaceous has been called a time of change, because the changes that took place during this period on a global scale were enormous. The southern continents were beginning to break from Gondwana, and the effects on the world were enormous. (Image 3)  As the continents moved from Gondwana the new arrangement of the land masses led to new circulation patterns in the oceans and the atmosphere. The ice caps at the north and south poles melted and became smaller and the water released raised the sea levels all around the globe (Image 4)  Australia had been beginning to break away from Antarctica but, where before it had been more or less one large land-mass, now the water flowed into shallow seas in the centre of the continent. The land that would later become Australia was broken up into a group of islands. (Image 5) Image 3 Image 4 Image 5

13. Ancient Inland Seas During the cretaceous period, much of Australia’s interior was a very different place to the scatter of salt-crusted lakes and sand ridges seen today. Scientists have looked at ancient shorelines around Lake Eyre and Lake Frome, two of Australia’s largest inland lakes, and found evidence of permanent mega-lakes, fed by perennial inland rivers. The scene probably featured more vegetation than today, large herbivores and diverse aquatic ecosystems spanning hundreds of kilometres. At that time, Lake Eyre would have been 25 m deep and with a volume of 380 cubic kilometres (roughly 700 Sydney Harbours). These inland mega-lakes were fed by big rivers such as Cooper Creek and the Diamantina River, which pumped large volumes of water into the interior every year to fill the lakes.

14. The Kronosaurus, an ancient creature found in the Eromanga Sea, is quite similar to the salt and fresh water crocodile. This creature lived in the vast lakes found in inland Australia during the Cretaceous period. The crocodiles surviving today could be the relatives of these dinosaurs.

15.  A catastrophic drying phase had already begun by the time the first Australians arrived, more than 50 000 years ago.  The overflowing mega-lakes had begun to shrink, and reliable supplies of freshwater began drying up.  All that remains today is the present day Lakes and river systems of Australia as well as underground water systems.  The Great Artesian Basin, an underground water basin, lies in almost the same spot as the ancient inland seas of 65 million years ago.

16. REFERENCES CONTENT: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=&authornamef=richard+gray+for+mailonline http://theconversation.com/ancient-aboriginal-stories-preserve-history-of-a-rise-in-sea-level-36010 http://attenboroughsreef.com/ IMAGES: http://www.wwf.org.au/ http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/ https://au.pinterest.com/mightymutti/montessori-history-and-timelines/ http://zsite59.blogspot.com.au/2011/10/evolution-story-of-life-prehistoric.html http://www.reefmagiccruises.com/charters/ http://www.mapsofworld.com/