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#australia #tasmania #victoria
The Bassian Plain is one of Australia's most extraordinary lost landscapes — a vast, now-submerged land bridge that once connected mainland Australia to Tasmania during the last Ice Age. For tens of thousands of years, this expansive plain stretched across what is now the Bass Strait, forming a critical pathway for the migration of Aboriginal Australians, plants, and animals. At the peak of the Last Glacial Maximum around 20,000 years ago, sea levels were over 120 metres lower than they are today. As a result, the shallow Bass Strait was dry land, and the Bassian Plain emerged as a sprawling ecosystem of grasslands, rivers, wetlands, and granite hills. It was not a narrow isthmus — it was a vast region of its own, rich with life and environmental diversity.

In this video, we explore the full geological history of the Bassian Plain. The story begins hundreds of millions of years ago with the tectonic formation of the Bass Basin — a Cretaceous rift basin that opened during the breakup of Gondwana. Over time, the basin filled with thick layers of sediment, creating a low-lying depression between two highland regions: the King Island High to the west and the Bassian Rise to the east. The granite-dominated Bassian Rise, which includes the Furneaux Group and parts of northeastern Tasmania, formed the backbone of the region, while the Bass Basin became the heart of the ancient plain. Together, these geological features shaped the topography of the land bridge that would eventually connect Tasmania to the mainland.

We also examine the unique environmental conditions that existed on the Bassian Plain during the Pleistocene. Rather than the cool temperate rainforests of modern Tasmania, the plain was covered in open grasslands and steppe vegetation, with rivers like the Tamar and Mitchell flowing north across the landscape into a large inland lake — sometimes referred to as “Lake Bass.” Pollen records, sediment cores, and faunal remains all point to a cold but well-watered environment, capable of supporting large populations of kangaroos, wallabies, emus, and waterbirds. Archaeological sites such as Cave Bay Cave on Hunter Island and Mannalargenna Cave on Prime Seal Island provide compelling evidence that Aboriginal Australians occupied this region for tens of thousands of years. These sites, once situated far inland on the Bassian Plain, now lie on isolated islands, offering a rare window into human life before the sea returned.

The human story of the Bassian Plain is just as compelling as its geology. People lived, hunted, and moved across this land for millennia. The archaeological record suggests that Aboriginal Tasmanians were living on what was then an inland plain as early as 35,000–40,000 years ago. With sea levels gradually rising after the end of the last glacial period, the plain began to flood. By around 14,000 to 12,000 years ago, the low-lying areas were transformed into estuaries, brackish lakes, and finally open sea. The connection between Tasmania and the mainland was severed, isolating Tasmania’s Indigenous population for thousands of years. This moment of separation — a dramatic reshaping of the continent — is one of the most significant geographic and cultural events in Australia’s ancient past.

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OzGeology is an Australian-based YouTube channel that specializes in creating high-quality documentaries on Earth sciences and natural disasters. The content is designed to be easy to digest and covers a wide range of topics, not only focusing on geology but occasionally exploring other scientific areas as well.

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