Tethys Ocean
[7] 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.
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).
[citation needed] 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.
[citation needed] 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.
Throughout the Cenozoic (66 million to the dawn of the Neogene, 23 Mya), the connections between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans across the Tethys were eventually closed off in what is now the Middle East during the Miocene, as a consequence of the northern migration of Africa/Arabia and global sea levels falling due to the concurrent formation of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
... and leads at once to the conviction, that during long periods antecedent, as will be hereafter explained, to the historic æra, 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.
... To render the distinction between these accumulations and all others clear and unambiguous, we have adopted the term Aralo-Caspian, first applied in a geographical sense, by our great precursor Humboldt, to this region of the globe.
... 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 Kirghis, and was bounded only by the mountains of the Hindoo Kusk and Chinese Tartary.
... there can be no sort of 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!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.
[14][15] 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 (lit.
[16] 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.
[18] 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.
[citation needed] 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).
