Impacts of climate change on sea turtles: a case study

Consider the Australiasian region at the end of the last Ice Age when Australia and New Guinea formed one large land mass. With a warming earth accompanied by melting ice caps and glaciers, the sea level rose and the Indian Ocean flooded into the Gulf of Carpentaria about 8,000 years BP, the Pacific Ocean breached the Torres Strait land bridge about 7,000 years BP and the coral islands of the Great Barrier Reef formed about 5,000 years BP. Turtle nesting beaches of 10,000 years BP are now totally submerged and most of the present day major marine turtle rookeries are located at sites that were inaccessible across dry land less than 150 turtle generations ago. The present major migratory route for adult green turtles feeding in eastern Indonesia, ArnhemLand and the Gulf of Carpentaria through Torres Strait to the Great Barrier Reef nesting beaches is a geologically recent phenomenon.