We wanted to emphasize here the necessity to incorporate detailed field studies in large scale reconstructions in order to better constrain them. On the other hand, large scale reconstructions provide a unified and simple continental margins framework in which local information can be organized. In doing so, it can be shown in the Alps, that the very complex structural pattern does not correspond to a complex palaeogeography. If complexity there is, it is due to an interaction between different plates, which somehow have a common junction in the Alpine area. These European, African, Iberic, Alboran and Adriatic plates can be easily recognised through their sedimentary series and subsidence behaviour, and their interaction during collision processes through foreland basin evolution.

We sum up here the major characteristics of the western Tethyan area:

First of all, the evolution of the eastern part of the orogen (Austria-Carpathes) has little to do with its western counter part (western Alps), they only go through a common fate only since the Late Cretaceous through a final and unified southward subduction of the Alpine Tethys and the Oligo-Miocene collision with Europe. Before that, the eastern Alps and Carpathian area are related to the closure of the Meliata-Vardar domain.

Similarly, the western Alps and Apenninic area have little in common, they locally share bits and pieces of the Alpine Tethys ophiolitic sequences, but the comparison stops at that. The Apenninic accretionary prism is issued from a northward subduction of a remnant Alpine Tethys sea-floor under Spain since Oligocene times. In Late Miocene, the slab roll-back eventually reached another oceanic remnant in the Ionian sea region consisting of the western most part of the NeoTethys ocean.

The fate of the Pyrenean domain is clearly related to a common wandering of Africa and Iberia between M0 and the Middle Eocene. This too often forgotten fact implies that the former northern margin of the Alpine Tethys had to be cut by the Pyrenean rift system, and a direct connection established between the two oceanic systems – Pyrenees-Biscay and Alpine Tethys. In order to avoid major Late Cretaceous collision or opening between Europe and Iberia, the plate limit had to be located along a grand circle, therefore the Iberian northern plate limit can be established with some confidence, as well as the former position of the Briançonnais domain. The ensuing duplication of the European margin can clearly be derived from thorough field investigation in the western Alps.

We hope to have provided here basic hard fact type information, which, somehow, should not be ignored by anybody who would be plate mover. But this is certainly not the end of the story, the Adria-Apulia separation/union being still far from a widely accepted solution, and we welcome any new information on the subject.