Caledonian Orogeny

The Caledonian orogeny is a mountain-building cycle recorded across the northern British Isles, the Scandinavian Caledonides, Svalbard, eastern Greenland and parts of north-central Europe, spanning roughly 490 to 390 million years ago from the Ordovician to the Early Devonian. It resulted from the closure of the Iapetus Ocean, as the continents Laurentia and Baltica converged with the Avalonia microcontinent and ultimately collided, and the mountain systems it raised, including the Scottish Highlands, the Scandinavian Caledonides and ranges in eastern Greenland, have since been pulled apart and scattered by the later opening of the Atlantic Ocean. This entity documents the Caledonian orogeny specifically as a geological formation, the mountain-building episode and the rock structures it produced.