Journal article
Hydrological transformation coincided with megafaunal extinction in central Australia
TJ Cohen, JD Jansen, LA Gliganic, JR Larsen, GC Nanson, JH May, BG Jones, DM Price
Geology | GEOLOGICAL SOC AMER, INC | Published : 2015
DOI: 10.1130/G36346.1
Abstract
Central to the debate over the extinction of many of Australia's last surviving megafauna is the question: Was climate changing significantly when humans arrived and megafauna went extinct? Here we present a new perspective on variations in climate and water resources over the last glacial cycle in arid Australia based on the study of the continent's largest lake basin and its tributaries. By dating paleoshorelines and river deposits in the Lake Eyre basin, we show that major hydrological change caused previously overflowing megalakes to enter a final and catastrophic drying phase at 48 ± 2 ka just as the giant bird, Genyornis newtoni, went extinct (50-45 ka). The disappearance of Genyornis ..
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Funding Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Australian Research Council (grants DP1096911, DP130104023) and the UK Natural Environment Research Council (grant NE/EO14143/1). We thank Tim Pietsch (then at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) for undertaking the gamma spectrometry, and John Magee for access to Lake Eyre samples. We thank John Magee, Giff Miller, and Roger LeB. Hooke for constructive discussions. We would like to thank six anonymous reviews for improving the clarity of this paper.