American and Tethyan Fold-Thrust Belts (PDF)

Orogenic belts and their shallow-soled fringes, the fold-thrust belts, are globally distributed in up to 20,000 km long mountain chains along the edges of the continents. Their locations, their geological origin in a mobile Earth, and their natural resources have drawn attention from the time of the Spanish and Portuguese global explorers to modernage geologists such as Emile Argand, Rein van Bemmelen, Albert Bally. Walter Bucher, Peter Coney, Augusto Gansser, A.M. Spencer, Hans Stille, Eduard Suess, and many others. Petroleum explorers have also accumulated and interpreted data from fold-thrust belts, but their collections have largely remained unpublished.

The present book represents a modern account of onshore fold-thrust belts and their tectonics. Part Two American and Tethyan Inventories: Cross sections of Fold-Thrust Belts (Beiträge zur regionalen Geologie der Erde, Band 34, 2020) is an inventory of these thick wedges of tectonic compression, along the edges of orogenic mountain belts worldwide and their shallow fringes, the fold-thrust belts.

In Part One, the new accounts are based on data processed during petroleum exploration in the Andes, the North-American Cordillera, the Mediterranean, and in the South-Asian countries. Exploration of the planet's vast deep-water fold belts has begun in earnest, but it is not yet part of the present synthesis. The author is a petroleum geologist, a professor, and an illustrator, but he has not yet summarized and published his geological views developed during 50 years of petroleum exploration on five continents.

The book is of interest to all geologists, resources engineers, technical consultants, and of course to the academic readership from all fields of the geosciences.