The Alpide belt is a concept from modern
historical geology, the study in geologic time of the events that shaped the surface of the Earth. The topic began suddenly in the mid-19th century with the evolutionary biologists. The early historical geologists, such as
Charles Darwin and
Charles Lyell, arranged fossils and layers of sedimentary rock containing them into time periods, of which the framework remains. The late 19th century was a period of synthesis, in which geologists attempted to combine all the detail into the big picture. The first of his type,
Eduard Suess, used the term "comparative orography" to refer to his method of comparing mountain ranges, parallel to "comparative anatomy" and "comparative philology. Suess had discovered the zone during his early work on the
Alps. 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." Like a human face, the Earth's face has
lineaments. Suess's topic was the definition and classification of the lineaments of this zone, which he traced from one end of Eurasia to the other, ending on the east with the
Malay Peninsula. Suess looked, as did all geologists, at the strata and content of
sedimentary rock, deposited as sediment in the oceanic basins, indurated under the pressure of the depths, and raised later under horizontal pressure into folds of mountain chains. What he added to the field is the study of what he called the "trend-lines" or directions of mountains chains. These were to be discovered by examining their
strikes, or intersections with the surface. He soon discovered what are known today as convergent plate borders, which are chains of mountains raised by the compression or subduction of one plate under another, but knowledge was not in such a state that he could recognize them as that. He concerned himself instead with the patterns. ==Main ranges (from west to east)==