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
Svecofennian orogeny and thick continental crust collapsed under the influence of gravity and spread out. By 1850 millions years ago this collapse had evolved to a dynamic of extensional tectonics. In this extensional milieu short-lived sedimentary basins formed. The Svecobaltic orogeny developed when subduction bought the Fennoscandian Craton into an oblique collision with the Sarmatian Craton. The mentioned sedimentary basins were destroyed by basin inversion 1830 million years ago. This last event of basin inversion was associated with a period of metamorphism in southern Finland that peaked about 1820 million years ago. Two models exist regarding the origin of the Nordic orogeny: