“Unveiled at Last: The Hidden Secrets of a 140-Million-Year-Old Continent Beneath Southern Europe!”
In Turkey and the Mediterranean, however, that theory doesn’t hold much weight.
“It is quite simply a geological mess,” said van Hinsbergen. “Everything is curved, broken and stacked. Compared to this, the Himalayas, for example, represent a rather simple system. There you can follow several large fault lines across a distance of more than 2,000 kilometers.”
Wikimedia CommonsThe Apennine mountains were formed when Greater Adria was forced beneath Southern Europe’s mantle. The Alps, the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey are believed to have resulted from this process as well.
Van Hinsbergen’s belief that the Mediterranean region is “geologically among the most complex” in the world is primarily the result of modern borders.
It “hosts more than 30 countries,” said Van Hinsbergen. “Each of these has its own geological survey, own maps and own ideas about the evolutionary history. Research often stops at the national borders.”
In order to reconstruct the evolution of these mountain ranges, Van Hinsbergen used software that allowed his team to look at tectonic plates across time.
“Our research provided a large number of insights, also about volcanism and earthquakes, that we are already applying elsewhere,” he said. “You can even predict, to a certain extent, what a given area will look like in the near future.”
They discovered that Greater Adria started forming into its own continent about 240 million years ago.
“From this mapping emerged the picture of Greater Adria, and several smaller continental blocks too, which now form parts of Romania, North Turkey or Armenia, for example,” said Van Hinsbergen.
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