page_title: Geology of Germany
section_title: Limestone Alps
hierarchical_section_title: Geology of Germany / German Alps / Limestone Alps
caption_attribution_description: English: Bedded Dachstein Limestone in the southeast wall of Mt. Watzmann seen from 3rd Child, Bavarian Alps, Germany. Deutsch: Gebankter Dachsteinkalk in der Ostwand des Watzmanns vom 3. Watzmannkind aus gesehen, Bayerische Alpen.
context_page_description: The geology of Germany is heavily influenced by several phases of orogeny in the Paleozoic and the Cenozoic, by sedimentation in shelf seas and epicontinental seas and on plains in the Permian and Mesozoic as well as by the Quaternary glaciations.
context_section_description: The Eastern Alps strike south of the Flysch Zone and occupy the largest area in the German Alps. In Germany, the Eastern Alps are, for the most part, Mesozoic mostly Triassic carbonate rocks. This carbonate rock association, whose outcrop (including the Austrian parts) runs in a 35 to 50-kilometre-wide strip from Vorarlberg as far as the Vienna Basin, is called the Northern Limestone Alps. In contrast to the Helvetic Domain and the Flysch Zone that still mostly have a low mountain character (German: Mittelgebirge) although they are morphologically clearly set apart from the Alpine foreland, the Northern Limestone Alps form high mountains (German: Hochgebirge) of well over 2,000 metres above sea level. Of the high mountains of Germany, the highest is Zugspitze, with a height of 2,962 metres, more than a thousand metres higher than Feldberg in the Black Forest, Germany's highest mountain outside the Alps.
  The Northern Limestone Alps represent a depositional environment that was probably located several hundred kilometres to the south, relative to the current position of the rocks. This is reflected in facies as well as in the fossil record: While in the Eastern Alps platform carbonates with tropical faunas were established during the late Middle Triassic, the contemporary, epicontinental, partly terrestrial sequences in Central Europe north of the Alps  are rather dominated by siliciclastics and had rather warm temperate faunas. Therefore, especially with regard to the formation of Triassic rocks, a distinction is made between "Germanic facies" (Central Europe north of the Alps) and "Alpine facies" (Northern Limestone Alps). Starting from the Late Cretaceous, the Eastern Alps were affected by the Alpine Orogeny and the rocks of the Northern Limestone Alps were stacked and transported northwards to their present position, overriding the Helvetic and Penninic domains.
caption: German Limestone Alps: Thickly bedded limestones of the Dachstein Formation (Late Triassic) in the east wall of Watzmann
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