Cimmerian Orogeny

The Cimmerian fold belt is now integrated into the alpidischen mountain belt structure of folded mountains that stretches from the Balkans to Southeast Asia. The Cimmerian orogeny took place, however, more than 100 million years before the alpidic orogeny.

The Cimmerian mountains caused by the movement of Cimmeria or Kimmeria said longitudinal continent - fragment of prehistoric supercontinent Pangaea, which in Perm ( mya more than 250), seceded from the North Rim of the Südostpangäa. The fragment was rotated as the hands of a clock, but counter-clockwise to a point at its northwestern end, which lay in the area of ​​today's Carpathian Mountains.

Cimmeria is also the name for the same north of the Tethysgrabens resulting volcanic island chain that today parts

• Of the Balkan Mountains,
• Dobrogea,
• Crimea,
• Anatolia,
• Iran
• Of the Caucasus,
• Tibet and
• Indochina,

Forms. As Tethysgraben is called the deep trench at the subduction zone at the ocean bottom of the Paläotethys shoved in North Hike Kimmerias and the emergence of Neotethys beneath the southern continental margin of the northeastern Pangaea.

The Cimmerian islands which lay in the Upper Jurassic and closed the Palaeotethys latest with formation of the suture in the Upper Cretaceous 65 mya, around the time of the Cretaceous - Tertiary boundary. Already in the earliest phase of the Alpine orogeny (from 100 mya ), these young mountains were shaped to Cimmerian fold belt and partially reallocated. Today, they are geological zones of the Alpine mountain belt.

The western Cimmerian mountains contain mainly overprinted Variscan and Cadomian crust trapped there parts of Cimmeria.

In Europe, the Balkans Hauptkollisionssutur - notch Riden from the Black Sea runs southwest through southern Bulgaria to Chalkidiki and then Macedonia to Kosovo and Serbia.

Tibet, as one of the eastern islands of the Cimmerian island chain was in the Eocene (50 mya ) through the plate motion of India to the north between the continental shelf of India and southern China, Siberia and the Kazakh Kraton bruised and possibly autopsied on these cratons. In the newly established fold mountains in the south of Tibet, the Himalaya, the Tethyan suture in Zanskar is certainly detectable. In the north, the course of the suture Palaeotethys is unclear. On the plate tectonic collision zone, however, indicate the following volcanic areas:

• The tart also active Vakak group and Thought -i - Navar group are partly classified as känozoisch than pleistozänisch in Afghanistan, and
• The volcanoes in western China in the Kunlun, Turfan and Xinjiang.

The differing views of the geology are also evident here: Other authors see as opposed to shown here considers the entire island chain Cimmeria Super Terran as Peri - Gondwana elements, and referred only to the Asian part of the Cimmerian mountains..

References, notes

Web links,

• Cimmeria in the Upper Jurassic. The ( Neo - ) Tethys is always on, Palaeotethys gets narrower. Cimmeria lies southeast of Baltica.

• Geology of the Alps
• Orogeny