The Alpide belt or Alpine-Himalayan orogenic belt, or more recently and rarely the Tethyan orogenic belt, is a seismic and orogenic belt that includes an array of mountain ranges extending for more than 15,000 kilometres (9,300 mi) along the southern margin of Eurasia, stretching from Java and Sumatra, through the Indochinese Peninsula, the Himalayas and Transhimalayas, the mountains of Iran, Caucasus, Anatolia, the Mediterranean, and out into the Atlantic. It includes, from west to east, the major ranges of the Atlas Mountains, the Alps, the Caucasus Mountains, Alborz, Hindu Kush, Karakoram, and the Himalayas. It is the second most seismically active region in the world, after the circum-Pacific belt (the Ring of Fire), with 17% of the world's largest earthquakes.The belt is the result of Mesozoic-to-Cenozoic-to-recent closure of the Tethys Ocean and process of collision between the northward-moving African, Arabian and Indian Plates with the Eurasian Plate. Each collision results in a convergent boundary, a topic covered in plate tectonics. The approximate alignment of so many convergent boundaries trending east to west, first noticed by Edouard Suess, suggests that once many plates... Wikipedia ()
