Australia There is limited evidence about conditions in Australia, though lake records in Victoria suggest that conditions, at least in the South of the state, were wet and/or unusually cool. In the north of the continent, the limited evidence suggests fairly dry conditions, while coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef show similar rainfall as today but with less variability. Borehole reconstructions from Australia suggest that, over the last 500 years, the seventeenth century was the coldest in that continent, although the borehole temperature reconstruction method does not show good agreement between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
The Younger Dryas stadial, also referred to as the Big Freeze, was a geologically brief (1,300 ± 70 years) period of cold climatic conditions and drought which occurred between approximately 12,800 and 11,500 years BP. The Younger Dryas stadial is thought to have been caused by the collapse of the North American ice sheets, although rival theories have been proposed.
It followed the Bølling-Allerød interstadial (warm period) at the end of the Pleistocene and preceded the preboreal of the early Holocene. It is named after an indicator genus, the alpine-tundra wildflower Dryas octopetala.
The Dryas stadials were cold periods which interrupted the warming trend since the Last Glacial Maximum 20,000 years ago. The Older