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The Alps continue fairly smoothly into the following related Alpine mountain ranges: the Apennines to the southwest, the Dinarides to the southeast and the Carpathians to the northeast. In the east the Alps are bounded by the Viennese Basin and the Pannonian Basin, where east–west stretching of the crust takes place.
The Alps acted as a geographical barrier to Italy, and the Alps for centuries were permeated with established smuggling routes, known as green line. After World War II, members of the Schutzstaffel that feared prosecution as war criminals , known in modern English only as SS , disappeared into a crowd of refugees . [ 151 ]
While smaller groups within the Alps may be easily defined by the passes on either side, defining larger units can be problematic. A traditional divide exists between the Western Alps and the Eastern Alps, which uses the Splügen Pass (Italian: Passo dello Spluga) on the Swiss-Italian border, together with the Rhine to the north and Lake Como in the south as the defining features.
In the Bronze Age, the Alps formed the boundary of the Urnfield and Terramare cultures. The mummy found on the Ötztal Alps, known as "Ötzi the Iceman", lived c. 3200 BC. At that stage the population in its majority had already changed from an economy based on hunting and gathering to one based on agriculture and animal husbandry.
For only a small portion of its total distance does the Alpine divide form a part of the main European watershed, in the central section where the watershed is between the Po and the Rhine. The Alps are generally divided into Eastern Alps and Western Alps, cut along a line between Lake Como and Lake Constance, following the Rhine valley. [1]
The Alpine orogeny is caused by the continents Africa, Arabia and India and the small Cimmerian Plate colliding (from the south) with Eurasia in the north. Convergent movements between the tectonic plates (the African Plate, the Arabian Plate and the Indian Plate from the south, the Eurasian Plate and the Anatolian Sub-Plate from the north, and many smaller plates and microplates) had already ...
Beneath the snowy slopes lay a prehistoric surprise: an ecosystem that predates the dinosaurs, revealed by melting snow before being stumbled upon by a hiker in the Italian Alps.
The basin formed as a result of the flexure of the European plate under the weight of the orogenic wedge of the Alps that was forming to the south. In geology , the name "molasse basin" is sometimes also used in a general sense for a synorogenic (formed contemporaneously with the orogen ) foreland basin of the type north of the Alps.