Orocline

An orocline — from the Greek words for "mountain" and "to bend" — is a bend or curvature of an orogenic (mountain building) belt imposed after it was formed.^[1] The term was introduced by S. Warren Carey in 1955 in a paper setting forth how complex shapes of various orogenic belts could be explained by actual bending, and that understanding this provided "the key to understanding the evolution of the continents".^[2] Carey showed that in a dozen cases where such bends were undone the results were substantially identical with continental reconstructions deduced by other means.^[3] Recognition of oroclinal bending provided strong support to the subsequent theory of plate tectonics.