Eurasia descends from Laurasia, the Laurentia part having split away to the west as a consequence of the formation of the North Atlantic Ocean.

[4] The late 19th century was a period of synthesis, in which geologists attempted to combine all the detail into the big picture.

He knew it had been a subsidence because it expressed deposits of the Mesozoic, now indurated into layers and raised into highlands by compressional force.

He spent the better part of his career following the zone in detail, which he assembled in one ongoing work, das Antlitz der Erde, "The Face of the Earth."

The word Alpide is a term first coined in German by Austrian geologist Eduard Suess in his 1883 magnum opus Das Antlitz der Erde[6] and later popularized in English-language scientific literature by Turkish geologist and historian A. M. Celâl Şengör in a 1984 paper on the topic.

The term belt refers to the fact that the Alpides form a long, mostly unbroken chain of orogens running west to east along the southern edge of Eurasia.