The Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians () are a range of mountains forming an arc across Central and Southeast Europe. Roughly long, it is the third-longest European mountain range after the Urals at and the Scandinavian Mountains at . The highest peaks in the Carpathians are in the Tatra Mountains, exceeding , closely followed by those in the Southern Carpathians in Romania, exceeding .
The range stretches from the Western Carpathians in Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, clockwise through the Eastern Carpathians in Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine and Romania, to the Southern Carpathians in Romania and Serbia.About the Carpathians – Carpathian Heritage Society "The Carpathians" European Travel Commission, in The Official Travel Portal of Europe, Retrieved 15 November 2016 The Carpathian Project: Carpathian Mountains in Serbia, Institute for Spatial Planning, Faculty of Geography, University of Belgrade (2008), Retrieved: 15 November 2016 The term Outer Carpathians is frequently used to describe the northern rim of the Western and Eastern Carpathians.
The Carpathians provide habitat for the largest European populations of brown bears, wolves, chamois, and lynxes, with the highest concentration in Romania, as well as over one-third of all European plant species. The mountains and their foothills also have many thermal and mineral waters, with Romania having one-third of the European total.București, stațiune balneară – o glumă bună? in Capital, 19 January 2009. Retrieved: 26 April 2011Ruinele de la Baile Herculane si Borsec nu mai au nimic de oferit in Ziarul Financiar, 5 May 2010. Retrieved: 26 April 2011
Romania is likewise home to the second-largest area of virgin forests in Europe after Russia, totaling 250,000 hectares (65%), most of them in the Carpathians,Salvați pădurile virgine! in Jurnalul Național, 26 October 2011. Retrieved: 31 October 2011 with the Southern Carpathians constituting Europe's largest unfragmented forest area.Europe: New Move to Protect Virgin Forests in Global Issues, 30 May 2011. Retrieved 31 October 2011. Rates of forest loss due to clearcutting, and deforestation due to illegal logging in the Carpathians are high.
Name
In modern times, the range is called in Czech, Polish and Slovak and in Ukrainian, / in Serbo-Croatian, in Romanian, in Rusyn, in German and in Hungarian. Although the toponym was recorded by Ptolemy in the second century AD, the modern form of the name is a neologism in most languages.
Historical names
In late Roman documents, the Eastern Carpathian Mountains were referred to as Montes Sarmatici (meaning Sarmatian Mountains).E.g. in work Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis, Asiana et Europiana, et de contentis in eis by Mathias de Miechow, first edition from 1517. Second book, chapter 1. The Western Carpathians were called Carpates, a name that is first recorded in Ptolemy's Geographia (second century AD).
In the Scandinavian Hervarar saga, which relates ancient Germanic legends about battles between Goths and Huns, the name Karpates appears in the predictable Germanic form as Harvaða fjöllum (see Grimm's law). "Inter Alpes Huniae et Oceanum est Polonia" ("Between the Hunic Alps and the ocean lies Poland") by Gervase of Tilbury, was described in his Otia Imperialia ("Recreation for an Emperor") in 1211. Thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Hungarian documents named the mountains Thorchal, Tarczal, or less frequently Montes Nivium ("Snowy Mountains").
Havasok ("Snowy Mountains") was its medieval Hungarian name. Rus' chronicles referred to it as "Hungarian Mountains". Later sources, such as Dimitrie Cantemir and the Italian chronicler Giovanandrea Gromo, referred to the range as "Transylvania's Mountains", while the 17th-century historian Constantin Cantacuzino translated the name of the mountains in an Italian-Romanian glossary to "Rumanian Mountains".
Etymology
The etymology of the Carpathians is not clearly established, but the name "Carpates" is highly associated with the old Dacian tribes called "Carpes" or "Carpi" who lived in an area to the east of the Carpathians, from the east, northeast of the Black Sea to the Transylvanian Plain in the present day Romania and Moldova.
Potential root words
Karpates is considered a Paleo-Balkan name, with evidence provided by the Albanian kárpë / kárpa, pl. kárpa / kárpat ('rock, stiff'), and the Messapic karpa 'tuff (rock), limestone' (preserved as càrpë 'tuff' in Bitonto dialect and càrparu 'limestone' in Salentino). p. 96 This connection is further supported by the fact that also the oronym Beskydy, a series of mountain ranges in the Carpathians, has a meaning in Albanian: bjeshkë / bjeshkët 'high mountains, mountain pastures' (cf. also the Albanian oronym Bjeshkët e Namuna, the Accursed Mountains / Albanian Alps).Çabej, Eqrem. (1972). Studime Filologjike. universiteti shtetëror i Tiranës. p. 67.
The name Carpates may ultimately be from the Proto Indo-European root *sker-/*ker-, which meant mountain, rock, or rugged (cf. Albanian kárpë, Germanic root *skerp-, Old Norse "harrow", Gothic skarpo, Middle Low German scharf "potsherd", and Modern High German Scherbe "shard", Lithuanian kar~pas "cut, hack, notch", Latvian cìrpt "to shear, clip"). The archaic Polish word karpa meant 'rugged irregularities, underwater obstacles/rocks, rugged roots, or trunks'. The more common word skarpa means a sharp cliff or other vertical terrain, cf. Old English and English sharp.
The name may instead come from Indo-European * 'to turn', akin to Old English 'to turn, change' (English warp) and Greek 'wrist' (Karpathos island has the same root word), perhaps referring to the way the Carpathian mountain range bends or veers in an L-shape.
Geography
Although commonly referred to as a mountain chain, the Carpathians do not form an uninterrupted chain of mountains, but consist of several orographically and geologically distinctive groups. The northwestern Carpathians begin in Slovakia and southern Poland. They surround Transcarpathia and Transylvania in a large semicircle, sweeping towards the southeast, and end on the Danube near Orșova in Romania. The total length of the Carpathians is over .
The mountain chain's width varies between . The highest altitudes of the Carpathians occur where they are widest, in the Transylvanian plateau and in the southern Tatra Mountains group. The highest range, in which Gerlachovský štít in Slovakia is the highest peak, is above sea level.
The Carpathians cover an area of . After the Alps, they form the next-most extensive mountain system in Europe. Percentage of the range by country is: Czech Republic (3%) and Austria (1%) in the northwest through Slovakia (21%), Poland (10%), Ukraine (10%), Romania (50%) to Serbia (5%) in the south.
It was believed that no area of the Carpathian range was covered in snow all year round and there were no glaciers, but recent research by Polish scientists discovered one permafrost and glacial area in the Tatra Mountains.
Comparison with the Alps
The Carpathians, which attain an altitude over in only a few places, lack the bold peaks, extensive snowfields, large glaciers, high waterfalls, and numerous large lakes that are common in the Alps. The Carpathians at their highest altitude are only as high as the middle region of the Alps, with which they share a common appearance, climate, and flora.
The Carpathians are separated from the Alps by the Danube, only meeting at the Leitha Mountains at Bratislava. The valley of the March and Oder separates the Carpathians from the Silesian and Moravian chains, which belong to the middle wing of the great Central Mountain System of Europe.
Unlike the other wings of the system, the Carpathians, which form the watershed between the northern seas and the Black Sea, are surrounded on all sides by plains. The Pannonian plain is to the southwest, the Lower Danubian Plain to the south, with the southern part being in Bulgaria, and the northern – in (Romania), and the Galician plain to the northeast.
Mountain passes In the Romanian part of the main chain of the Carpathians, mountain passes include Prislop Pass, Tihuța Pass, Bicaz Canyon, Ghimeș Pass, Buzău Pass, Predeal Pass (crossed by the railway from Brașov to Bucharest), Turnu Roșu Pass (1,115 ft., running through the narrow gorge of the Olt River and crossed by the railway from Sibiu to Bucharest), Vulcan Pass, and the Iron Gate (both crossed by the railway from Timișoara to Craiova).
Geology
The area now occupied by the Carpathians was once occupied by smaller ocean basins. The Carpathian mountains were formed during the Alpine orogeny in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic by moving the ALCAPA (Alpine-Carpathian-Pannonian), Tisza and Dacia plates over subducting oceanic crust.
The mountains take the form of a fold and thrust belt with generally north vergence in the western segment, northeast to east vergence in the eastern portion and southeast vergence in the southern portion. Currently, the area is the most seismically active in Central Europe.
The external, generally northern, portion of the orogenic belt is a Tertiary accretionary wedge of a so-called Flysch belt (the Carpathian Flysch Belt) created by rocks scraped off the sea bottom and thrust over the North-European plate. The Carpathian accretionary wedge is made of several thin skinned nappes composed of Cretaceous to Paleogene turbidites. Thrusting of the Flysch nappes over the Carpathian foreland caused the formation of the Carpathian foreland basin. The boundary between the Flysch belt and internal zones of the orogenic belt in the western segment of the mountain range is marked by the Pieniny Klippen Belt, a narrow complicated zone of polyphase compressional deformation, later involved in a supposed strike-slip zone.
Internal zones in western and eastern segments contain older Variscan igneous massifs reworked in Mesozoic thick and thin-skinned nappes. During the Middle Miocene this zone was affected by intensive calc-alkaline arc volcanism that developed over the subduction zone of the flysch basins. At the same time, the internal zones of the orogenic belt were affected by large extensional structure of the back-arc Pannonian Basin. The last volcanic activity occurred at Ciomadul about 30,000 years ago.
The mountains started to gain their current shape from the latest Miocene onward. At some locations solifluction deposits have formed on the slopes of the Carpathians. Iron, gold and silver were found in great quantities in the Western Carpathians. After the Roman emperor Trajan's conquest of Dacia, he brought back to Rome over 165 tons of gold and 330 tons of silver.
Ecology
The ecology of the Carpathians varies with altitude, ranging from lowland forests to alpine meadows. Foothill forests are primarily of broadleaf deciduous trees, including oak, hornbeam, and linden. European beech is characteristic of the montane forest zone. Higher-elevation subalpine forests are characterized by Norway spruce (Picea abies). Krummholz and alpine meadows occur above the treeline.
Wildlife in the Carpathians includes Eurasian brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos), Eurasian wolf (Canis lupus lupus), Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx), European wildcat (Felis silvestris), Tatra chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra tatrica), European bison (Bison bonasus), and golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos).
Divisions of the Carpathians