The Acadian orogeny is a middle Paleozoic deformation, especially in the northern Appalachians, between Alabama and Newfoundland. In Gaspé and adjacent areas, its climax is dated as early in the Late Devonian, but deformational, plutonic, and metamorphic events extended into Early Mississipian times. The Acadian should be regarded, not as a single orogenic episode, but rather as an orogenic era. It appears to have been contemporaneous with the Bretonic phase of the Variscan orogeny of Europe, with metamorphic events in southwestern Texas and Mexico, and with the Antler orogeny of the Great Basin. The Paleozoic is a major division of the geologic timescale, one of four geologic eras. ... The Appalachian Mountains are a system of North American mountains running from Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada to Alabama in the United States, although the northernmost mainland portion ends at the Gaspe Peninsula of Quebec. ... The Gaspé Peninsula or just the Gaspé (la Gaspésie in French) is a North American peninsula on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River, in Quebec. ... The Devonian is a major division of the geologic timescale that extends from the end of the Silurian period (360 million years ago (mya)) to the beginning of the Mississippian subperiod of the Carboniferous (408. ... The Great Basin is a large, arid region of the western United States, commonly defined as the contiguous watershed region, roughly between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, that has no natural outlet to the sea. ...

See also

• Iapetus Ocean
• Taconic orogeny

The Iapetus Ocean was an Ocean that existed in the Southern Hemisphere between Scotland, England and Scandinavia between 400 and 600 million years ago. ...

References

• Dictionary of Geological Terms, 3rd. Edition,1984, Robert L. Bates and Julia A. Jackson, Eds., prepared by The American Geological Institute
• International Tectonic Dictionary, 1967, Memoir 7, Am. Assoc. Petroleum Geologists, p. 114