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Alpine-Himalayan Orogens |
Sedgwick Museum, Downing Street, Cambridge CB2 3EQ
Dept. of Geology, University of California, Davis, California 95616, U.S.A.
The Hellenides have become classic ground largely from the work of Aubouin and his collaborators, who have interpreted the structures in terms of the development and deformation of a major geosyncline. This belt then, provides a particularly well documented case of an orogen in which compressional features developed progressively in successive tectonic zones across the belt through Cretaceous and Tertiary time, and in which major displacement of thrust sheets across the belt can be quantified.
In plan, the Hellenides form a straight stretch 500 km long, joined in the south to an arc 600 km around its outer edge. Their boundary with the Dinarides is conventionally taken as the Scutari-Pe
Segment: the north-west Hellenides only are described here. The selected segment stretches for 200 km along strike
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This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
line, which marks the termination of several important facies belts (Aubouin 1959, pp. 496-504): it is possibly a complex transform fault. The outer margin of the Hellenides—the margin nearest the Mediterranean—is drawn here at the probable limit of Tertiary thrust faulting, as on the islands of Kefallinia and Levkas, or at the 1000 m submarine contour. The inner margin of the Hellenides has been placed at the Strimon line, a structure in Thrace that probably marks the trace of a south-west dipping thrust. This line is the junction of the Hellenides with the Rhodope zone, beyond which lies the Balkan chain. Between these margins, the width of the orogenic belt varies from 700 km (Crete to Alexandroupolis) to 425 km (Corfu to Drama).
