Wow--Beringia--from Wikipedia--

Geography

Bering land bridge – Wisconsin glaciation

The remains of Late Pleistocene mammals that had been discovered on the Aleutians and islands in the Bering Sea at the close of the 19th century indicated that a past land connection might lie beneath the shallow waters between Alaska and Chukotka. The underlying mechanism was first thought to be plate tectonics, but by 1930 changes in the ice mass balance which led to global sea-level fluctuations were viewed as the cause of the Bering land bridge.[11][12] In 1937, Eric Hultén proposed that around the Aleutians and the Bering Strait region were tundra plants that had originally dispersed from a now-submerged plain between Alaska and Chukotka, which he named Beringia after Vitus Bering who had sailed into the strait in 1728.[13][12][14] The distribution of plants in the genera Erythranthe and Pinus are good examples of this, as very similar genera members are found in Asia and the Americas.[15][16]

American arctic geologist David Hopkins[17] redefined Beringia to include portions of Alaska and Northeast Asia. Beringia was later regarded as extending from the Verkhoyansk Mountains in the west to the Mackenzie River in the east.[12] During the Pleistocene epoch, global cooling led periodically to the expansion of glaciers and the lowering of sea levels; these processes created land connections in various regions around the globe.[18] Today, the average water depth of the Bering Strait is 40–50 m (130–160 ft); therefore the land bridge opened when the sea level was more than 50 m (160 ft) below the current level.[19][20] A reconstruction of the sea level history of the region indicated that a seaway existed from c. 135,000 – c. 70,000 YBP, a land bridge from c. 70,000 – c. 60,000 YBP, an intermittent connection from c. 60,000 – c. 30,000 YBP, and a land bridge from c. 30,000 – c. 11,000 YBP, followed by a Holocene sea level rise that reopened the strait.[21][22] Post-glacial rebound has continued to raise some sections of the coast.[citation needed]

The Last Glacial Period caused a much lower global sea level

During the last glacial period, enough of the Earth's water became frozen in the great ice sheets covering North America and Europe to cause a drop in sea levels. For thousands of years the sea floors of many interglacial shallow seas were exposed, including those of the Bering Strait, the Chukchi Sea to the north, and the Bering Sea to the south.