From the Eastern Paratethys to the Pontocaspian basins

Abstract

Image of a dust storm over the Aral Sea in 2005. Nowadays, the right branch of the sea is completely gone. Image credit: Jeff Schmaltz, NASA's Visible Earth catalogue. Paratethys The Paratethys was an ancient, vast Eurasian sea that once extended from the Alps on the West to western China on the East (Laskarev, 1924; Rögl, 1999; Schulz et al., 2005). Nowadays, small remnants of this sea in the form of the Black and Caspian seas are left. The large-scale evolution of the Paratethys, from its birth until now, was actively controlled by the tectonic collision of the African, Eurasian and Arabian plates, including further several microplates. Around the Oligocene-Eocene transition (~35 Ma), ongoing plate collision separated the Paratethys from the Mediterranean Sea (Schulz et al., 2005). Subsequent evolution of the Paratethys was driven by a prograding collision that resulted in the formation of the Caucasus, Alps, Carpathians and several other mountain ranges. Initially, the Paratethys comprised a Western, Central and Eastern domain. The short-lived and small Western Paratethys formed in the Alpine foreland basin and became isolated at the end of the early Miocene