Asia to America on foot
Beringia, the Ice Age land bridge
Today: two continents
The Bering Strait separates Siberia from Alaska, and Asia from North America. At its narrowest it is roughly 85 km across.
Lower the sea by 50 m
The strait is shallow. In the GEBCO grid, a dry path between the two continents opens once the sea drops by about 45 m.
Beringia
During the last ice age the sea was roughly 120 to 130 m lower. The land bridge was not a narrow isthmus but a vast tundra plain, more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from north to south.
A road between worlds
Animals such as mammoths and horses moved between the continents across this land, and many researchers think the first people to reach the Americas came this way.
The sea returns
As the great ice sheets melted, the rising sea flooded the land bridge and split the continents apart again.
Pull the plug and watch the sea level fall, explore the seafloor as real terrain, find what lies off your own coast, and follow guided stories, from the Ice Age land bridge between England and France to the wreck of the Titanic. Everything is built from GEBCO's grid of the world's ocean floor and land.
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Stories
- Walk from England to France: Doggerland in the Ice Age
- Asia to America on foot: Beringia, the Ice Age land bridge
- Where the Titanic rests: 3,800 m down in the North Atlantic
- Drop Everest into the Mariana Trench: And watch it disappear
- The longest mountain range on Earth: is underwater: the mid-ocean ridge
Places
- Challenger Deep
- Mid-Atlantic Ridge
- Hawaiian–Emperor seamounts
- Puerto Rico Trench
- Kerguelen Plateau
- Titanic wreck site
- Monterey Canyon
- East Pacific Rise