Orogeny process whereby new mountains and other land-forms were thrust up, or else there would eventually be no land; he suggested that marine fossils in mountainsides must once have been at the sea-floor. Orogeny was used by Amanz Gressly (1840) and Jules Thurmann (1854) as "orogenic" in terms of the creation of mountain elevations, as the term "mountain building" was still used to describe the processes. Elie de Beaumont (1852) used the evocative "Jaws of a Vise" theory to explain orogeny, but was more concerned with the height rather than the implicit structures created by and contained in orogenic belts. His
Famatinian orogeny part of the orogen as it was subject to metamorphism in the early Paleozoic. To the south in La Pampa Province, outcrops associated with the orogeny are scarce since most of that region has become blanketed by much more recent Quaternary sediments. In Peru's Cordillera Oriental a "Famatinian" orogeny exists which is coeval with the classical Famatinian orogeny found further south. In the time-span from 480 Ma to 435 Ma (Late Cambrian to Silurian) rocks of Cordillera Oriental were deformed and a magmatic arc developed. Towards what is now the east of the Famatinian magmatic arc a Precambrian sedimentary basin