Alpide belt
Alpine-Himalayan orogenic belt
The approximate extent of the Alpide orogenic system.
Highest point
PeakMount Everest
Elevation8,848.86 m (29,031.7 ft)
Dimensions
Length15,000 km (9,300 mi) E–W on the west, N–S on the east
Naming
EtymologyThe word Alpide is a term first coined in German by Swiss geologist Eduard Suess in his 1883 magnum opus Das Antlitz der Erde[1] and later popularized in English-language scientific literature by Turkish geologist and historian A. M. Celâl Şengör in a 1984 paper on the topic.[2] The term adds the suffix -ides, derived from the Ancient Greek patronymic/familial suffix -ίδης (-ídēs), to the Alps, suggesting a "family" of related orogens. Finally, the term belt refers to the fact that the Alpides form a long, mostly unbroken chain of orogens running west to east along the southern edge of Eurasia.
Geography
Mesozoic oceanic platformSouthern Eurasia, northern Africa, central Asian subcontinent, southeast Asia
Geology
Formed bycompressive forces at aligned convergent plate boundaries
OrogenyIf "Alpide" is taken in Kober's sense to mean the last and current of a collective group of contemporaneous ridges over the entire Tethyan region, then "Alpine orogeny" is used collectively of all the orogenies required to create the Alpides, a definition that is far from the original meanings of Alpide and Alpine, representing a specialized geologic usage.
Mountain typeFolded mountain ranges

The Alpide belt or Alpine-Himalayan orogenic belt,[3] or more recently and rarely the Tethyan orogenic belt, is a seismic and orogenic belt that includes an array of mountain ranges extending for more than 15,000 kilometres (9,300 mi) along the southern margin of Eurasia, stretching from Java and Sumatra, through the Indochinese Peninsula, the Himalayas and Transhimalayas, the mountains of Iran, Caucasus, Anatolia, the Mediterranean, and out into the Atlantic.[4]

It includes, from west to east, the major ranges of the Atlas Mountains, the Alps, the Caucasus Mountains, Alborz, Hindu Kush, Karakoram, and the Himalayas. It is the second most seismically active region in the world, after the circum-Pacific belt (the Ring of Fire), with 17% of the world's largest earthquakes.[4]

The belt is the result of Mesozoic-to-Cenozoic-to-recent closure of the Tethys Ocean and process of collision between the northward-moving African, Arabian, and Indian Plates with the Eurasian Plate.[3] Each collision results in a convergent boundary, a topic covered in plate tectonics. The approximate alignment of so many convergent boundaries trending east to west, first noticed by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, suggests that once many plates were one plate, and the collision formed one subduction zone, which was oceanic, subducting the floor of Tethys.

Suess called the single continent Gondwana, after some rock formations in India, then part of the supercontinent of Gondwana, which had earlier divided from another supercontinent, Laurasia, and was now pushing its way back. Eurasia descends from Laurasia, the Laurentia part having split away to the west to form the Atlantics. As Tethys closed, Gondwana pushed up ranges on the southern margin of Eurasia.

Brief history of the concept

The Alpide belt is a concept from modern historical geology, the study in geologic time of the events that shaped the surface of the Earth.[5] The topic began suddenly in the mid-19th century with the evolutionary biologists. The early historical geologists, such as Charles Darwin and Charles Lyell, arranged fossils and layers of sedimentary rock containing them into time periods, of which the framework remains.[6]

The late 19th century was a period of synthesis, in which geologists attempted to combine all the detail into the big picture. The first of his type, Eduard Suess, used the term "comparative orography" to refer to his method of comparing mountain ranges, parallel to "comparative anatomy" and "comparative philology.[7]

His work preceded plate tectonics and continental drift. This pre-tectonic phase lasted until about 1950, when the drift theory won the field just as suddenly as had the evolutionist. The concepts and language of the comparative graphists were kept with some modification, but were explained in new ways.

Suess's subsidence theory

The author of the concept of a trans-Eurasian zone of subsidence, which he called Tethys, was Eduard Suess. He knew it had been a subsidence because it expressed deposits of the Mesozoic, now indurated into layers and raised into highlands by compressional force.[8] Suess had discovered the zone during his early work on the Alps. He spent the better part of his career following the zone in detail, which he assembled in one ongoing work, das Antlitz der Erde, "The Face of the Earth." Like a human face, the Earth's face has lineaments. Suess's topic was the definition and classification of the lineaments of this zone, which he traced from one end of Eurasia to the other, ending on the east with the Malay Peninsula.

Suess looked, as did all geologists, at the strata and content of sedimentary rock, deposited as sediment in the oceanic basins, indurated under the pressure of the depths, and raised later under horizontal pressure into folds of mountain chains. What he added to the field is the study of what he called the “trend-lines” or directions of mountains chains. These were to be discovered by examining their strikes, or intersections with the surface. He soon discovered what are known today as convergent plate borders, which are chains of mountains raised by the compression or subduction of one plate under another, but knowledge was not in such a state that he could recognize them as that. He concerned himself instead with the patterns.

Main ranges (from west to east)

Indonesia lies between the Pacific Ring of Fire along the northeastern islands adjacent to and including New Guinea and the Alpide belt along the south and west from Sumatra, Java and the Lesser Sunda Islands (Bali, Flores, and Timor). The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake just off the coast of Sumatra was located within the Alpide belt.

Citations

  1. ↑ Suess, Eduard (1909) [1883]. "10: Eintritt der Altaiden nach Europa". Das Antlitz der Erde [The Face of the Earth] (in German). Vol. 3.2, part 4. Vienna: F. Tempsky. p. 3. LCCN 10004406. OCLC 1414429730. Retrieved 2023-12-30. Die zweite Aenderung besteht darin, dass nun die Ketten, welche jünger sind als das Ober-Carbon oder Perm, sich räumlich scharf abtrennen. Sie liegen fast ganz innerhalb von Senkungen der Altaiden, umrahmt von Linien, die nicht selten das Streichen der Altaiden durchschneiden. Man kann diese umrahmten Ketten als posthume Altaiden ansehen. Die alpinen Ketten (Alpiden) sind ihr wichtigstes Glied. Die Alpiden besitzen einen tertiären Saum. Im variscischen Aussenrande, z. B. ausserhalb der belgischen Kohlenfelder, sieht man nichts Aehnliches. Ueberhaupt ist jüngere Faltung in den Horsten der europäischen Altaiden nur gar selten und in geringem Maasse sichtbar. Es ist, als wäre der Rahmen erstarrt, und die Faltung vom Ober-Carbon an auf die gesenkten Räume eingeschränkt. [In the next place those chains of the Altaides which are younger than the upper Carboniferous and the Permian are separated sharply in space. They lie almost wholly within subsided areas of the Altaides, framed in by lines which frequently cut across the strike of these mountains. We may regard the chains thus framed in as posthumous Altaides. The Alpine chains (Alpides) are their most important member. The Alpides are bordered by a Tertiary zone. Nothing analogous to this is to be seen in the outer margin of the Variscan arc, i.e. outside the Belgian coal-fields. Indeed the younger folding occurs but seldom in the horsts of the European Altaides, and is then only feebly developed. It is as though the frame had become rigid, and the folding, from the upper Carboniferous onwards, had been confined to the downthrown areas. (translated by Hertha B. C. Sollas, under the direction of W. C. Sollas, 1909)]
  2. ↑ Şengör, A. M. Celâl (1984). The Cimmeride Orogenic System and the Tectonics of Eurasia. Geological Society of America Special Paper. Vol. 195. Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America. p. 11. doi:10.1130/SPE195. ISBN 9780813721958. LCCN 84018845. OCLC 859566590. Retrieved 2023-12-30. Figure 7 shows the present extent of the orogenic system related to the obliteration of Paleo-Tethys as compared with that generated during the closure of Neo-Tethys. I call the former the Cimmerides (Figure 7B, I); the latter I define to constitute the Alpides (Figure 7B, II). The Cimmerides and the Alpides may be defined to form the Tethysides, for they both descended from Tethys s.l. (Figure 7A). The Alpine-Himalayan mountain belt therefore consists of two mutually independent, but largely superimposed orogenic complexes (Figure 7A).
  3. 1 2 K.M. Storetvedt, K. M., The Tethys Sea and the Alpine-Himalayan orogenic belt; mega-elements in a new global tectonic system, Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, Volume 62, Issues 1–2, 1990, Pages 141–184 Abstract
  4. 1 2 "Where do earthquakes occur?". USGS. Archived from the original on 5 August 2014. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
  5. ↑ Suess 1904, p. 594 "In human affairs as in the physical world the present is only a transverse section; we cannot see the future which lies beyond, but we may gain instruction from the past. Thus the history of the earth is of fundamental importance in the description of the earth."
  6. ↑ Suess 1904, p. 594 "A general comparative orography, drawn from the existing store of observations, has not yet been created, and he who endeavours step by step to organize the elements of such a synthesis must be content if he finds that the structure he has raised is open to completion and correction,..."
  7. ↑ Suess 1904, p. 594 "A general comparative orography, drawn from the existing store of observations, has not yet been created, and he who endeavours step by step to organize the elements of such a synthesis must be content if he finds that the structure he has raised is open to completion and correction,..."
  8. ↑ Suess 1908, p. 19 "Gondwana-land is bounded on the north by a broad zone of marine deposits of Mesozoic age....It must be regarded in its entirety as the relic of a sea which once extended across the existing continent of Asia."

General and cited references

  • Suess, Eduard (1904). Sollas, W. J. (ed.). The Face of the Earth [das Antlitz der Erde]. Vol. I. Translated by Sollas, Hertha B. C. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
  • Suess, Eduard (1908). Sollas, W. J. (ed.). The Face of the Earth [das Antlitz der Erde]. Vol. III. Translated by Sollas, Hertha B. C. (Revised ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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