Cimmerian fold belt

Map of the Alpid mountain belt.

The Cimmerian Plate begins its northerly movement towards Laurasia (~ 249 mya Permian - Triassic border)

The situation ~ 100 mya. The Cimmerian Plate had collided with Laurasia about 90-100 million years earlier. This clash had closed the Palaeotethys and formed the Cimmerian fold belt . In the picture, India has already started its rapid northward movement and will first create the Tethys Trench and then the Asian part of the Alpine mountain belt from the Cretaceous to the Holocene .

The Cimmerian fold belt is a structure of fold mountains that is now integrated into the Alpine belt and extends from the Balkans to Southeast Asia . However, the Cimmerian orogeny took place more than 100 million years before the Alpidian orogeny.

The Cimmerian mountains were created by the movement of an elongated continent fragment called Cimmeria or Kimmeria of the prehistoric supercontinent Pangea , which split off from the northern edge of the southeastern Panea in the Permian (more than 250 mya ). The fragment rotated like the pointer of a clock, but counterclockwise, around a point at its northwestern end, which was in the area of ​​today's Carpathian Mountains .

Cimmeria is also the name for thevolcanic island chain thatwas formednorth of the Tethys Trench , which today parts

• of the Balkan Mountains ,
• the Dobruja ,
• the Crimea ,
• Anatolia ,
• of Iran ,
• of the Caucasus ,
• Tibet and
• Indochina ,

forms. The Tethys Trench is the name given to the deep-sea trench at the subduction zone , where the ocean floor of the Palaeotethys pushed under the southern continental margin of the northeastern Pangea during the northern migration of Kimmeria and the formation of the Neotethys.

The Cimmerian Islands rose in the Upper Jurassic and closed the Palaeotethys at the latest with the formation of the suture in the Upper Cretaceous around 65 mya, around the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary border . Even in the earliest phase of the alpine mountain formation (from 100 mya) these young mountains were deformed into the Cimmerian belt of folds and partially rearranged. Today they are geological zones of the Alpine mountain belt.

The western Cimmerian mountains contain predominantly overprinted Variscan and the Cadomian crustal parts of Cimmeria enclosed there .

In Europe, the main collision suture of the Balkan-Cimmerids runs from the Black Sea southwest through southern Bulgaria to Chalkidiki and then via Macedonia to Kosovo and Serbia .

Tibet, as one of the eastern islands of this Cimmerian island chain , was squeezed in the Eocene (50 mya) by the plate movement of India to the north between the continental plate of India and the south Chinese , Siberian and Kazakh craton and possibly also autopsied on these cratons . In any case, the suture of the Tethys near Zanskar can be traced in the newly formed Fold Mountains in the south of Tibet, the Himalaya . In the north, the course of the Palaeotethys suture is unclear. However, the following volcanic areas indicate the plate tectonic collision zone:

• The recently active Vakak group and Dacht-i-Navar group in Afghanistan which are classified as Cenozoic , partly Pleistocene , and
• the volcanoes in western China in Kunlun , Turfan and Xinjiang .

The different views of geology are also clear here: In contrast to the view presented here, other authors see the entire Cimmeria-Superterran island chain as Peri-Gondwana elements, and only designate the Asian part as the Cimmerian Mountains .

References, notes

1. ↑ Map of the mountain formations in Europe
2. ↑ see graphics, en: Cimmerian Plate , en: Cimmeria (continent)

Web links,

• Cimmeria in the Upper Jura. The (Neo-) Tethys is getting wider and wider, Palaeotethys is getting narrower and narrower. Cimmeria is located southeast of Baltica.