Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Variscan orogeny
Summary
The Variscan or Hercynian orogeny was a geologic mountain-building event caused by Late Paleozoic continental collision between Euramerica (Laurussia) and Gondwana to form the supercontinent of Pangaea.
The name Variscan, comes from the Medieval Latin name for the district Variscia, the home of a Germanic tribe, the Varisci; Eduard Suess, professor of geology at the University of Vienna, coined the term in 1880. (Variscite, a rare green mineral first discovered in the Vogtland district of Saxony in Germany, which is in the Variscan belt, has the same etymology.)
Hercynian, on the other hand, derives from the Hercynian Forest. Both words were descriptive terms of strike directions observed by geologists in the field, variscan for southwest to northeast, hercynian for northwest to southeast. The variscan direction reflected the direction of ancient fold belts cropping out throughout Germany and adjacent countries and the meaning shifted from direction to the fold belt proper.
One of the pioneers in research on the Variscan fold belt was the German geologist Franz Kossmat, establishing a still valid division of the European Variscides in 1927.
The other direction, Hercynian, for the direction of the Harz Mountains in Germany, saw a similar shift in meaning. Today, Hercynian is often used as a synonym for Variscan but is somewhat less used than the latter. In the United States, it is used only for European orogenies; the contemporaneous and genetically linked mountain-building phases in the Appalachian Mountains have different names.
The regional term Variscan underwent a further meaning shift since the 1960s. Geologists generally began to use it to characterize late Paleozoic fold-belts and orogenic phases having an age of approximately 380 to 280 Ma.
Some publications use the term Variscan for fold belts of even younger age, deviating from the meaning as a term for the North American and European orogeny related to the Gondwana-Laurasia collision.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.