Alpide belt
The Alpide belt or Alpine-Himalayan orogenic belt, 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.
| Alpide belt | |
|---|---|
| Alpine-Himalayan orogenic belt | |
The approximate extent of the Alpide orogenic system. | |
| Highest point | |
| Peak | Mount Everest |
| Elevation | 8,848.86 m (29,031.7 ft) |
| Dimensions | |
| Length | 15,000 km (9,300 mi) E–W on the west, N–S on the east |
| Naming | |
| Etymology | The word Alpide is a term first coined in German by Swiss geologist Eduard Suess in his 1883 magnum opus Das Antlitz der Erde and later popularized in English-language scientific literature by Turkish geologist and historian A. M. Celâl Şengör in a 1984 paper on the topic. 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 platform | Southern Eurasia, northern Africa, central Asian subcontinent, southeast Asia |
| Geology | |
| Formed by | compressive forces at aligned convergent plate boundaries |
| Orogeny | If "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 type | Folded mountain ranges |
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.
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. 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.