Tethys Ocean

The Tethys Ocean /ˈtiːθɪs, ˈtɛθɪs/ (Greek:

Τηθύς Tēthús), also called the Tethys Sea
or the Neo-Tethys, was a prehistoric
ocean during much of the Mesozoic Era
and early Cenozoic Era, located between
the ancient continents of Gondwana and
Laurasia, before the opening of the Indian
and Atlantic oceans during the Cretaceous
Period.
 First phase of the Tethys Ocean's forming:
the (first) Tethys Sea starts dividing
Pangaea into two supercontinents,
Laurasia and Gondwana.

It was preceded by the Paleo-Tethys

Ocean, which lasted between the
Cambrian and the Early Triassic, while the
Neotethys formed during the Late Triassic
and lasted until the early Eocene (about 50
million years ago) when it completely
closed.[1] A portion known as the
Paratethys formed during the Late
Jurassic, was isolated during the
Oligocene (34 million years ago) and
lasted up to the Pliocene (about 5 million
years ago), when it largely dried out.[2] The
ocean basins of Europe and Western Asia,
namely the Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea
and Caspian Sea, are each remnants of the
Paratethys Ocean.[1]

Etymology
The sea was named after Tethys, who, in
ancient Greek mythology, was a sea
goddess, a sister and consort of Oceanus,
mother of the Oceanid sea nymphs and of
the world’s great rivers, lakes and
fountains.
Terminology and
subdivisions
The eastern part of the Tethys Ocean is
sometimes referred to as Eastern Tethys.
The western part of the Tethys Ocean is
called Tethys Sea, Western Tethys Ocean,
or Paratethys or Alpine Tethys Ocean. The
Black, Caspian, and Aral seas are thought
to be its crustal remains, though the Black
Sea may, in fact, be a remnant of the older
Paleo-Tethys Ocean.[3] The Western Tethys
was not simply a single open ocean. It
covered many small plates, Cretaceous
island arcs, and microcontinents. Many
small oceanic basins (Valais Ocean,
Piemont-Liguria Ocean, Meliata Ocean)
were separated from each other by
continental terranes on the Alboran,
Iberian, and Apulian plates. The high sea
level in the Mesozoic flooded most of
these continental domains, forming
shallow seas.

As theories have improved, scientists have

extended the "Tethys" name to refer to
three similar oceans that preceded it,
separating the continental terranes: in
Asia, the Paleo-Tethys (Devonian–
Triassic), Meso-Tethys (late Early
Permian–Late Cretaceous), and Ceno-
Tethys (Late-Triassic–Cenozoic) are
recognized.[4] None of the Tethys oceans
should be confused with the Rheic Ocean,
which existed to the west of them in the
Silurian Period.[5] To the north of the
Tethys, the then-land mass is called
Angaraland and to the south of it, it is
called Gondwanaland.[6]

Modern theory
From the Ediacaran (600 Mya) into the
Devonian (360 Mya), the Proto-Tethys
Ocean existed and was situated between
Baltica and Laurentia to the north and
Gondwana to the south.
From the Silurian (440 Mya) through the
Jurassic periods, the Paleo-Tethys Ocean
existed between the Hunic terranes and
Gondwana. Over a period of 400 million
years, continental terranes intermittently
separated from Gondwana in the Southern
Hemisphere to migrate northward to form
Asia in the Northern Hemisphere.[4]

Triassic Period

Plate tectonic reconstruction of the

Tethys realm at 249 Mya
About 250 Mya,[7] during the Triassic, a
new ocean began forming in the southern
end of the Paleo-Tethys Ocean. A rift
formed along the northern continental
shelf of Southern Pangaea (Gondwana).
Over the next 60 million years, that piece
of shelf, known as Cimmeria, traveled
north, pushing the floor of the Paleo-
Tethys Ocean under the eastern end of
northern Pangaea (early / proto- Laurasia).
The Neo-Tethys Ocean formed between
Cimmeria and Gondwana, directly over
where the Paleo-Tethys formerly rested.
Jurassic Period

During the Jurassic period about 150 Mya,

Cimmeria finally collided with Laurasia and
stalled, so the ocean floor behind it
buckled under, forming the Tethys Trench.
Water levels rose, and the western Tethys
shallowly covered significant portions of
Europe, forming the first Tethys Sea.
Around the same time, Laurasia and
Gondwana began drifting apart, opening
an extension of the Tethys Sea between
them which today is the part of the
Atlantic Ocean between the Mediterranean
and the Caribbean. As North and South
America were still attached to the rest of
Laurasia and Gondwana, respectively, the
Tethys Ocean in its widest extension was
part of a continuous oceanic belt running
around the Earth between about latitude
30°N and the Equator. Thus, ocean
currents at the time around the Early
Cretaceous ran very differently from the
way they do today.

Late Cretaceous

Plate tectonic reconstruction of the

Tethys realm at 100 Mya
Between the Jurassic and the Late
Cretaceous, which started about 100 Mya,
Gondwana began breaking up, pushing
Africa and India north across the Tethys
and opening up the Indian Ocean.

Cenozoic

Throughout the Cenozoic (66 million to the

dawn of the Neogene, 23 Mya), a
combination of the northern migration of
Africa and global sea levels falling
eventually led to the connections between
the Atlantic and Indian Oceans across the
Tethys being closed off in what is now the
Middle East during the Miocene. This
decoupling occurred in two steps, first
around 20 Mya and another around 14
Mya.[8] During the Oligocene (33.9 to 23
Mya), large parts of central and eastern
Europe were covered by a northern branch
of the Tethys Ocean, called the Paratethys.
The Paratethys was separated from the
Tethys with the formation of the Alps,
Carpathians, Dinarides, Taurus, and Elburz
mountains during the Alpine orogeny.
During the late Miocene, the Paratethys
gradually disappeared, and became an
isolated inland sea.[9]
Historical theory
In Chapter 13 of his 1845 book,[10]
Roderick Murchison described a
distinctive formation extending from the
Black Sea to the Aral Sea in which the
creatures differed from those of the purely
marine period that preceded them. The
Miocene deposits of Crimea and Taman,
(south of the Sea of Azov) are identical
with formations surrounding the present
Caspian Sea, in which the univalves of
freshwater origin, are associated with
forms of Cardiacae and Mytili that are
common to partially saline or brackish
waters. This distinctive fauna has been
found throughout all the enormously
developed Tertiary formations of the
southern and south-eastern steppes.

"... there can be no doubt that all

the masses of water now
separated from each other, from
the Aral to the Black Sea
inclusive, were formerly united
in this vast pre-historical
Mediterranean; which (even if
we restrict its limits to the
boundaries we already know,
and do not extend them
eastward, amid low regions
untrodden by geologists) must
have exceeded in size the
present Mediterranean!...
Judging from the recital of
travellers and from specimens of
the rock, we have no doubt that
it extended to Khivah and the
Aral Sea; beyond which the low
level of the adjacent eastern
deserts would lead us to infer,
that it spread over wide tracts
in Asia now inhabited by the
Turkomans and Kyrgyz people,
and was bounded only by the
mountains of the Hindu Kush
and Chinese Tartary... and leads
at once to the conviction, that
during long periods, a vast
region of Europe and Asia was
covered by a Mediterranean Sea
of brackish water, of which the
present Caspian is the
diminished type... we have
adopted the term Aralo-Caspian,
first applied to this region of the
globe by Humboldt, for this
formation."
On the accompanying map, Murchison
shows the Aralo-Caspian Formation
extending from close to the Danube delta
across Crimea, up the east side of the
Volga river to Samara, then south of the
Urals to beyond the Aral Sea. Brackish and
upper freshwater components (OSM) of
the Miocene are now known to extend
through the North Alpine foreland basin
and onto the Swabian Jura with thickness
of up to 250m; these were deposited in the
Paratethys when the Alpine front was still
100km farther south.[11][12]
 Geologist Eduard Suess in
1869

In 1885, the Austrian palaeontologist

Melchior Neumayr deduced the existence
of the Tethys Ocean from Mesozoic
marine sediments and their distribution,
calling his concept Zentrales Mittelmeer
and described it as a Jurassic seaway,
which extended from the Caribbean to the
Himalayas.[13]

In 1893, the Austrian geologist Eduard

Suess proposed the hypothesis that an
ancient and extinct inland sea had once
existed between Laurasia and the
continents which formed Gondwana II. He
named it the Tethys Sea after the Greek
sea goddess Tethys. He provided evidence
for his theory using fossil records from the
Alps and Africa.[14] He proposed the
concept of Tethys in his four-volume work
Das Antlitz der Erde (The Face of the
Earth).[15]

In the following decades during the 20th

century, "mobilist" geologists such as Uhlig
(1911), Diener (1925), and Daque (1926)
regarded Tethys as a large trough between
two supercontinents which lasted from the
late Palaeozoic until continental fragments
derived from Gondwana obliterated it.

After World War II, Tethys was described

as a triangular ocean with a wide eastern
end.

From 1920s to the 1960s, "fixist"

geologists, however, regarded Tethys as a
composite trough, which evolved through
a series of orogenic cycles. They used the
terms 'Paleotethys', 'Mesotethys', and
'Neotethys' for the Caledonian, Variscan,
and Alpine orogenies, respectively. In the
1970s and '80s, these terms and 'Proto-
Tethys', were used in different senses by
various authors, but the concept of a
single ocean wedging into Pangea from
the east, roughly where Suess first
proposed it, remained.[16]

In the 1960s, the theory of plate tectonics

became established, and Suess's "sea"
could clearly be seen to have been an
ocean. Plate tectonics provided an
explanation for the mechanism by which
the former ocean disappeared: oceanic
crust can subduct under continental crust.

Tethys was considered an oceanic plate by

Smith (1971); Dewey, Pitman, Ryan and
Bonnin (1973); Laubscher and Bernoulli
(1973); and Bijou-Duval, Dercourt and
Pichon (1977).

See also
Oceans
portal

Hațeg Island – Prehistoric island

List of ancient oceans – List of Earth's
former oceans
Paleo-Tethys Ocean – Ocean on the
margin of Gondwana between the
Middle Cambrian and Late Triassic
Pannonian Sea – Shallow ancient sea
where the Pannonian Basin in Central
Europe is today
 Paratethys – Prehistoric shallow inland
sea in Eurasia
Piemont-Liguria Ocean – Former piece
of oceanic crust that is seen as part of
the Tethys Ocean
Ruhpolding Formation
Tethyan Trench – Ancient oceanic
trench

References

Notes

1. "Tethys Sea | Definition, Location, & Facts |

Britannica" (https://www.britannica.com/pl
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Retrieved 2022-02-24.
2. Stampfli, Gérard. "155 Ma - Late Oxfordian
(an. M25)" (https://web.archive.org/web/20
120113060454/http://www.unil.ch/webda
v/site/igp/shared/Research/Geodynamics_
-_Stampfli/155.pdf) (PDF). University of
Lausanne. Archived from the original (htt
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f) (PDF) on 2012-01-13.
3. Van der Voo 1993
4. Metcalfe 2013, Introduction, p. 2
5. Stampfli & Borel 2002, Figs. 3–9
6. Hsü, Kenneth. Challenger at Sea: A Ship
That Revolutionized Earth Science. p. 199.
7. "Middle Triassic" (https://web.archive.org/w
eb/20080516030745/http://www.palaeos.c
om/Mesozoic/Triassic/MidTrias.html) .
Palaeos Mesozoic: Triassic. Archived from
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8. Bialik et al. 2019
9. Steininger, F.F.; Wessely, G. (2000). "From
the Tethyan Ocean to the Paratethys Sea:
Oligocene to Neogene stratigraphy,
paleogeography and paleobiogeography of
the circum-Mediterranean region and the
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10. "On the Geology of Russia in Europe and
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ails/bub_gb_He1P7aF0nCYC/page/296/mo
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ttps://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002Sed
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2FS0037-0738%2801%2900285-8) .
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14. Suess 1893, p. 183: "This ocean we
designate by the name "Tethys" after the
sister and consort of Oceanus. The latest
successor of the Tethyan Sea is the present
Mediterranean."
15. Suess 1901, Gondwana-Land und Tethys, p.
25: "Dasselbe wurde von Neumayr das
'centrale Mittelmeer' genannt und wird hier
mit dem Namen Tethys bezeichnet werden.
Das heutige europäische Mittelmeer ist ein
Rest der Tethys." (It was named by
Neumayr the "central Middle Sea" and here
it will be designated by the name "Tethys".
The current European Mediterranean Sea is
a remnant of the Tethys.)
16. Metcalfe 1999, How many Tethys Oceans?,
pp. 1–3

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