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Tethys, Thetis, Thethys, or Thetys?
What, where, and when was it?
E. T. Tozer
Geological Survey of Canada
601 Booth Street, Ottawa K1A 0E8, Canada
ABSTRACT
The origin of different names for Tethys is recounted, followed
by a discussion of its geologic meaning. Much written recently is
contrary to Suess's original ideas, which were based on good geologic
data. Tethys is a paleogeographic feature not necessarily having pa-
leozoogeographic overtones. It was a seaway, partly shallow, partly
deep. At times it formed an enormous gulf on the east side of Pangea,
and at other times it divided Gondwana from Eurasia. There were
often islands in Tethys. Tethys came into being during the Cambrian
or late Precambrian; it is not merely a feature that originated in
Permian-Triassic time.
DIFFERENT NAMES FOR THE SAME THING
The name "Tethys" was introduced for a now-vanished seaway by
Suess (1893, p. 183). He named it for the Greek goddess Tr)dv's, the sister
and consort of Oceanus.
There are three synonyms of geologic Tethys. Thetis (Qe'ns) derives
from another goddess. Thethys and Thetys are different transliterations of
Tethys and Thetis. Jenkyns (1980), Sonnenfeld (1981), and §engor (1984)
discussed these names, but none of their accounts is exactly correct.
Sonnenfeld (1981, p. 18) wrote that Suess introduced the name as
"Thetys," and later changed it to "Tethys" "after some argument with his
colleague, Alexander Bittner." §engor (1984, p. 3) pointed out that
Sonnenfeld was mistaken, Suess having used "Tethys" from the very be-
ginning. Sonnenfeld also seems to have been wrong to say that there had
been an argument about the name between Suess and Bittner. On the con-
trary, as indicated below, Suess (1901, p. 50) expressed agreement with
Bittner's comments on the terminology. §engor wrote that Sonnenfeld
used "Thetis," not "Thetys" in place of "Tethys." In fact, Sonnenfeld used
"Thetys." "Thetys" versus "Thetis" may seem utterly trivial, but, as we
shall see, it was not so to Bittner. Although §engor was certainly right to
point out that Suess introduced the name as "Tethys," not "Thetis" or
"Thetys," he seems to have been mistaken when he wrote that
"Mojsisovics . . . in a paper co-authored with Suess, used Thetis for
Tethys" (§engor, 1984, p. 3). In his publications, Suess wrote of Tethys,
not of Thetis or Thetys.
Kahler (1955), however, did use "Thetis." He seems to have had
Suess's definition in mind, but was concerned only with its Carboniferous
and Permian manifestation. Fltigel (1981), in discussing Tethys [sic] re-
ferred to Kahler's paper but did not mention the discrepancy between
"Tethys" and "Thetis."
"Thetys" was introduced by the Vienna "Trias trio": Mojsisovics,
Waagen, and Diener (1895, p. 1272). In the jointly written part of this
paper, "Thetys" appeared with the footnote "Diesen Namen schlug E.
Suess fur das Centrale Mittelmeer Neumayr's vor," giving reference to
Suess's 1893 paper. Neumayr died in 1890, so he did not live to see Tethys
named. Tethys, however, was mentioned in the second edition of his
882
Erdgeschichte (Neumayr, 1895, p. 262). It was presumably introduced by
the editor, V. Uhlig. In using "Thetys" it might be supposed that the trio
had made a spelling mistake. Clearly, from their reference to Suess, they
did not consider that they were introducing a new name. "Tethys" of Suess
and Uhlig certainly equals "Thetys" of the trio. Mojsisovics was probably
responsible for "Thetys," because it was also used throughout his mono-
graph on the Triassic ammonoids of the Himalaya (Mojsisovics, 1896,
p. 686). When Diener later wrote on the subject he consistently used
"Tethys," except for one lapse to "Thetys," probably a mistake (Diener,
1916, p. 515-526.).
Gignoux, in editions of his textbook published between 1926
and 1960 (e.g., Gignoux, 1960, p. 171), consistently used "Thetys." In
the English translation it is transformed into "Tethys" (Gignoux, 1955,
p. 247).
Very strange indeed is a recent book by 20 authors edited by Motz
(1979). The index lists six page references to "Thetis." Every one turns out
to be "Tethys"! Is it possible that the compiler of the index was playing a
joke?
The name "Thethys" was in Paul (1895, p. 487,490). Jenkyns (1980)
thought that this article was written by the Trias trio and that they were
inconsistent in their spelling, but in fact it is a review and summary by
C. M. Paul. So "Thethys" should be attributed to Paul, not the trio.
Bittner (1896), Sylvester-Bradley (1967), McKenzie (1987), and
Naidin (1986), between them, knew most of the above. In 1896, Bittner
published a critical review of the paper by the Trias trio: in a footnote he
took them to task for "Thetys," remarking that "Tethys" was acceptable,
being the wife of Oceanus; "Thetis" might have done but was a different
goddess (the mother of Achilles). Mojsisovics's "Thetys" is scornfully dis-
missed as having been nobody. It was these remarks with which Suess
agreed, not argued against, as implied by Sonnenfeld.
"Tethys" versus "Thetis" is less clear cut than Bittner would have had
us believe. Graves (1960, p. 50) indicated that in some contexts "Tethys"
and "Thetis" were different names given to the same goddess. §engor
(1984) cited another authority on Greek mythology who said the same.
WHAT WAS TETHYS?
Tethys was originally envisaged by Suess (1893, p. 183) as a seaway
that extended across Eurasia throughout the Paleozoic and Mesozoic. He
later used Neumayr's "centrale Mittelmeer" as an example (Suess, 1901,
p. 25). Neumayr introduced his sea in a Jurassic context. It extended from
the site of the Caribbean to India. §engor (1985, p. 3) was wrong when he
wrote that Suess used the Jurassic "Mittelmeer" as a Tethys example when
first introducing the concept in 1893. This came eight years later, in Das
Antlitz der Erde. At the outset Tethys was a feature of both the Paleozoic
and Mesozoic.
The evidence for a continuous seaway was partly provided by sim-
ilarities in the faunas. Early on, Suess was stressing the similarities in the
Triassic faunas (Suess, 1895; Tozer, 1984, p. 45). Some marine faunas
GEOLOGY, v. 17, p. 882-884, October 1989
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found for the first time in the Tethys and subsequently elsewhere have
been characterized as Tethyan. This has led to use of Tethyan in a zoogeo-
graphic or climatic sense, but it is best reserved for the paleogeographic
feature (Newton, 1988).
To Suess, some of the Tethys rocks indicated shallow water, others
deep-water deposition (Suess, 1901, p. 372; 1909, p 646). He did not
consider that Tethys comprised only the deep oceanic parts of the seaway.
Many contemporary workers interpret Tethys in the same way (e.g., Jen-
kyns, 1980, p. 109). The interpretations of Stócklin (1974) and §engor
(1984, 1985) are different. They regarded only oceanic rocks as represen-
tative of Tethys. Different interpretations of this kind were responsible for
the disagreement between Teichert (1973) and Burrett (1972, 1973), Tei-
chert being a Tethys seaway advocate, Burrett preferring an oceanic defini-
tion. I side with Teichert because his view is that of Suess. If Tethys is to
comprise only those parts that had a floor of oceanic crust, it will be
difficult or impossible to define its extent and will necessitate the exclusion
of rocks that Suess and many later workers regarded as representative.
W H E R E W A S TETHYS?
To Suess (1901, p. 25), Tethys lay between Gondwanaland and
Angaraland, Angaraland being the part of Asia east of the Urals. He
described it as extending from the East Indies through the Himalaya to
Asia Minor. The Himalaya, also mentioned in his first account (Suess,
1893, p. 181), was clearly regarded as representative. The concordant
Paleozoic-Mesozoic sequence there typifies the south shore of Tethys. This
and comparable sequences now known in Arabia and Oman, among other
places (Stoneley, 1974, Fig. 1), provide unambiguous evidence for a pas-
sive margin on the north side of the Gondwana continents from the
Cambrian (or earlier) until at least the Late Cretaceous.
Suess recognized that the extent of Tethys varied with time. For the
Triassic, Suess's colleague Diener (1916, p. 515) aptly described it as
extending from the Pillars of Hercules to the Gulf of Tonkin. When the
Atlantic started to form early in the Jurassic, Tethys became Neumayr's
Mittelmeer and extended across to the Americas.
W H E N W A S TETHYS?
Everybody agrees with Suess that Tethys ceased to exist during the
Cenozoic Alpine orogeny, which formed the existing continent of Asia.
The evidence for the lost seaway is now in "the folded and crumpled
deposits. . . [that]. . . stand forth to heaven in Thibet, Himalaya and the
Alps" (Suess, 1893, p. 183).
The quotation from Suess also indicates when he considered Tethys
history to have started. When Suess wrote about the Himalaya, he knew,
from the work of C. L. Griesbach, that these mountains preserved a
concordant sequence extending at least from the Lower Silurian (i.e.,
Ordovician) to the Cretaceous. Suess thus knew that there was good
evidence for a Paleozoic-Mesozoic seaway, unaffected by Caledonian,
Hercynian, or Mesozoic orogeny, on the north side of this part of Gond-
wana. Griesbach's sections are south of the Indus suture, in what is now
known as the Tethys Himalaya (Gansser, 1964, p. 68). In his later writ-
ings, Suess (1901,1909) dealt mainly with the Mesozoic history of Tethys,
but nothing suggests that he departed from his original view, that it was a
feature of both the Paleozoic and Mesozoic.
Boucot and Gray (1987) denied the existence of an early Paleozoic
Tethys, but on paleoclimatological rather than paleogeographical grounds.
They interpreted Tethys as an equatorial belt. They recognized a Paleozoic
parent for Mesozoic Tethys, but the parent is not given the same name
because it was not equatorial for most of its history.
While accepting §engor's (1984) interpretation of the rifting and
closure of Tethys, I suggest that he was wrong (1984, p. 4) to write
"Tethys was originally defined as a solely Mesozoic phenomenon." He
GEOLOGY, October 1989
distinguished a northern Paleo-Tethys that was deformed in the Mesozoic
Cimmerian orogeny and a southern Neo-Tethys that escaped this deforma-
tion. Neo-Tethys, in his interpretation, did not start to open until about
Permian time. Neo-Tethys was described as corresponding to the classi-
cal Tethys. Although active rifting immediately north of the Indian seg-
ment of Gondwana may not have started until the Permian, the
seaway—Suess's Tethys—was there long before. Its early history is clearly
shown on the Phanerozoic Plate Tectonic Reconstructions of Scotese
(1988).
§engor (1985, p. 9) and Trumpy (1982, p. 715) have debated the
Paleo-Tethys-Neo-Tethys question. §engor remarked, in opposition to
Trumpy, "because Paleo-Tethys never extended into the western Mediter-
ranean . . . there can be no distinction as Paleo- and Neo-Tethys in that
region." This begs the question, If the western Mediterranean is not Paleo-
Tethys, what is it? The pattern on §engor's map (1985, p. 10) suggested
that he regarded it as Neo-Tethys. Because §engor's distinctions are based
on tectonic history, not longevity, are we to conclude that the western
Mediterranean, with its extensive Hercynian orogeny, is the same sort of
Tethys as in the Himalaya, which escaped this tectonism? For this reason I
find §engor's twofold classification of the Tethys misleading. As a tectonic
classification it fails to contrast the different histories of southern, north-
eastern, and Mediterranean Tethys. As a paleogeographic classification it
would also fail, because it implies that Neo-Tethys was a younger seaway
than Paleo-Tethys, which is denied by the geology on the north flank of
Gondwana.
Bernoulli and Lemoine (1980) also treated Tethys as being an essen-
tially Mesozoic feature. Even less justified, and certainly contrary to
Suess's ideas, is the statement "Tethys, s.s. was an Early Jurassic creation"
(Hsu and Bernoulli, 1978, p. 943). Talent et al. (1987, p. 88) were wrong
to describe Suess's "authentic Tethys" as a "post-Hercynian" feature, as
was Tollmann (1984), who regarded it as a "postvariszische"
phenomenon.
Workers preoccupied with the parts of Tethys complicated by Her-
cynian, Indosinian, and Cimmerian tectonism seem to have lost sight of
the relatively undisturbed history of the equally important southern part.
CONCLUSIONS
Tethys remains a useful name for the seaway which lay on the north
side of Gondwana throughout the Paleozoic and Mesozoic. Although its
Mesozoic and later history is best understood (Smith, 1971), its existence
in the Paleozoic cannot be denied. Chronological modifiers, e.g., "Late
Triassic Tethys" as in Dewey et al. (1973), are useful, as are geographic
designations (Trumpy, 1982, p. 715). Prefixes like "Paleo" and "Neo" are
not strictly chronological or geographic, but indicate genetic conceptions.
As such they are open to different interpretations and are ambiguous. I
question their usefulness.
These are not just quibbles about nomenclature. There was a passive
margin on the north side of Gondwana throughout the Paleozoic and
Mesozoic. Tethys was the adjacent seaway. When did this regime start?
Could it be that an extensive period of evaporite deposition attended the
birth of Tethys, as with the Atlantic? This was the event that formed the
rocks in the Iran salt plugs and the Salt Range mines. These rocks are
Cambrian or late Precambrian (Stocklin, 1968). This seems a likely start-
ing time for Tethys.
There is still scope for argument and much remains to be done. Like
§engor (1985), I will end as did Suess in 1893: "Let us patiently continue
our work and remain friends."
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Kevin Burke and J. W. Haggart for helpful comments. Geological
Survey of Canada Contribution 50888.
Manuscript received April 10, 1989
Manuscript accepted May 15,1989
GEOLOGY, October 1989
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Geology

Tethys, Thetis, Thethys, or Thetys? What, where, and when was it?
E. T. Tozer

Geology 1989;17;882-884
doi: 10.1130/0091-7613(1989)017<0882:TTTOTW>2.3.CO;2

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