Wallacea – The Crucible If you stand on the waterline on the south eastern tip of Bali, you can see another island in the distance, a mere 20 -30 kilometres away. This is the boundary between two worlds and the start of Wallacea which lies at the crossroads between Asia and Australasia. It is made up of a number different islands including Sulawesi, Timor, Halmahera, Flores and the Lesser Sundas. Though small in area, its isolation and unique history have given rise to the world’s greatest concentration of endemic species (50 %) with considerable variation between islands as well. Geographic Context Located between the humid tropics of the Sunda Shelf (Asia) in the west and the drier Sahul Shelf (Australia and New Guinea) in the east, deep water trenches prevented most of Asia’s large mammals from reaching these islands, even during the low water levels of the Ice Ages. This abrupt shift in flora and fauna was first noted by Alfred Russell Wallace -a contempora...
Veronika Wild
Practising Geographer - nature culture places people