Distribution
The North American and European Variscan Belt includes the mountains of Portugal and western Spain (Galicia), southwestern Ireland (i.e. Munster), Cornwall, Devon, Pembrokeshire, the Gower Peninsula and the Vale of Glamorgan. Its effects are present in France from Brittany, below the Paris Basin to the Ardennes, the Massif Central, the Vosges and Corsica. It shows in Sardinia in Italy and in Germany where the Rhine Massif (Ardennes, Eifel, Hunsrück, Taunus and other regions on both sides of Middle Rhine Valley), the Black Forest and Harz Mountains remain as testimony. In the Czech Republic and eastern Poland the Bohemian Massif is the eastern end of the Variscan belt of crustal deformation in Europe. Further Variscan developments to the southeast are partly hidden and overprinted by the alpine orogeny. In the Alps a Variscan core is built by Mercantour, Pelvoux, Belledonne, Montblanc and Aar Massif. Dinaric, Greek and Turkish mountain chains are the southwestern termination of the Variscan proper.
The Variscan was contemporaneous with the Acadian and Alleghenian orogeny in the United States, forming the Ouachita and Appalachian Mountains. Other North American areas with Variscan foldbelts include New England, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. The Moroccan Meseta and the Anti Atlas in northwestern Africa show close relations to the Appalachian Mountains and have been the eastern part of the Appalachian orogeny before the opening of the Atlantic Ocean in Jurassic times.
Variscan mountains in a broader sense are the Urals, the Pamir, the Tian Shan and other Asian foldbelts.
Read more about this topic: Variscan Orogeny
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