Neo-Tethys Sea

The equatorially situated east–west Tethyan seaway linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans was modified significantly in the east during the middle Eocene—about 45 million years ago—by the junction of India with Eurasia, and it was severed into two parts by the confluence of Africa, Arabia, and Eurasia during the…

…the floor of the ancient Tethyan Sea, which covered part of Eurasia during the Oligocene, were deformed early in the development of the European Alps.

…Panthalassa, with its branch, the Tethys Sea (a large indentation in the tropical eastern side of Pangea).

…of Panthalassa known as the Tethys Sea. This ancient seaway was later to extend farther westward to Gibraltar as rifting between Laurasia and Gondwana began in the Late Triassic. Eventually, by Middle to Late Jurassic times, it would link up with the eastern side of Panthalassa, effectively separating the two…

A vast ocean, called the Tethys Ocean, lay south of Europe and Asia and north of Africa, Arabia, and India. Much of the rock that now forms the mountain system, which includes the Alps and the Himalayas was deposited on the margins of the Tethys Ocean.

…northward, a new ocean, the Neo-Tethys, was opening behind it and north of the Gondwanaland supercontinent. The new ocean began closing some 155 million years ago, shortly after the beginning of the major disintegration of Gondwanaland. Two fragments of Gondwanaland, India and Arabia, collided with the rest of Asia during…

…the Indian Ocean, called the Tethys, transferred continental terranes (fault-bounded fragments of the crust) from Gondwanaland to Asia; later generations of that ocean rifted material northward, including the biggest and latest terrane of India. Off the east, an ancient Pacific Ocean opened and closed in the first of a series…

…residual basin of the ancient Tethys Sea, dating roughly from 250 to 50 million years ago. The present form of the sea probably emerged at the end of the Paleocene Epoch (about 55 million years ago), when structural upheavals in Anatolia split off the Caspian basin from the Mediterranean. The…

…to a new ocean, the Tethys Sea. Closure of that ocean about 50 million years ago, by subduction and plate-tectonic processes, led to the Alpine orogeny—e.g., the formation of the Alpine orogenic system, which extends from the Atlantic Ocean to Turkey and contains many separate orogenic belts (which remain as…

During the Mesozoic Era the Tethys Sea evolved in what is now southern Europe, and during the Cenozoic Era that ocean was destroyed by subduction as many small plates collided. Those events gave rise to the present-day tectonic mosaic that extends eastward from the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, the…

…ago), a deep crustal downwarp—the Tethys Ocean—bordered the entire southern fringe of Eurasia, then excluding the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian subcontinent. About 180 million years ago, the old supercontinent of Gondwana (or Gondwanaland) began to break up. One of Gondwana’s fragments, the lithospheric plate that included the Indian subcontinent,…

…main existing remnant of the Tethys Sea, which formerly girdled the Eastern Hemisphere. Studies employing the theory of seafloor spreading that have been undertaken since the late 20th century, however, have suggested that the present Mediterranean seafloor is not part of the older (200 million years) Tethys floor. The structure…

…basins, the opening of the Tethys seaway circling the globe in tropical latitudes and its subsequent closing, and the opening of the Southern Ocean as the southern continents moved north away from Antarctica.

The Neo-Tethys Sea—commonly referred to simply as Tethys, the Tethys Sea, or the Neo-Tethys Ocean—began forming in the wake of the rotating Cimmerian continent during the earliest part of the Mesozoic Era. During the Jurassic the breakup of Pangea into Laurasia to the north and Gondwana…