Dolomites

The Dolomites are a mountain range in northeastern Italy, spanning the regions of Veneto, Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli-Venezia Giulia between the Adige river to the west and the Piave valley to the east, covering roughly 15,942 square kilometers. Marmolada, at 3,343 meters, is the range's highest peak. The mountains are built mainly from dolomite, a carbonate rock closely related to limestone, laid down chiefly during the Triassic period as marine and reef sediment, part of the wider Southern Limestone Alps; the rock takes its name, and gave the range its name, from the eighteenth-century French mineralogist Deodat Gratet de Dolomieu, who first described it. The range was raised into its present mountainous form by the same Alpine orogeny that built the rest of the Alps, folding and uplifting the marine carbonate rock along with some interbedded volcanic material. This entity documents the Dolomites specifically as a geological formation, a mountain range built from tectonically uplifted carbonate rock, distinct from the dolomite mineral itself.