The Bering Strait is a 52-mile-wide (85 kilometers), 165-foot-deep (50 meters) stretch of water between Alaska and Siberia. Today, it divides North America and Asia. However, during the coldest part of the last ice age between about 26,500 and 19,000 years ago, as the planet's water became frozen in massive ice sheets, global sea levels were about 425 feet (130 m) lower. The resulting Bering Land Bridge let animals such as mammoths and horses roam between Asia and the Americas.
Much remains debated about whether and how humans used the Bering Land Bridge to migrate to the New World. For instance, a 2022 study found that this strip of land may have been blocked by an icy barrier by the time humans could have come to it. As such, the first people in the Americas may have boated or walked along the bridge's coast instead of trekking across its interior on foot.
