Arabia still crumples Iran into the Zagros folds
The Zagros Mountains run about 1,600 kilometres across western Iran, southeastern Turkey, and northern Iraq. Miocene collision between the Arabian and Eurasian plates folded Paleozoic-to-Cenozoic sediments into a belt that still rises as the plates keep pushing, over Iran's main oilfields.
The range tracks Iran’s western border before swinging southeast. Southeast sectors deform above a salt décollement; northwest sectors lack that slippery layer, so styles of folding differ along strike. Almost entirely sedimentary and mostly limestone, the Elevated Zagros exposes Paleozoic rocks high in the stack. Fars summits approach 4,000 metres.
Oil loves this geology: deposition and traps made the western foothills Iran’s main petroleum province, with salt domes aiding migration and sealing. Neanderthals left the earliest human fossils known from the range; people have lived here since the Lower Paleolithic. Farming signs appear by about 9000 BC in the foothills; later centres included Anshan, Susa, and sites such as Jarmo.
Shanidar Cave has yielded ten Neanderthals dated between about 65,000 and 35,000 years ago, and a Neolithic foot bone from Wezmeh Cave carries DNA from a genetic group previously unknown to science. Hajji Firuz Tepe and Godin Tepe hold some of the earliest traces of stored wine, from between 5400 and 3500 BC. In antiquity the mountains were home to peoples such as the Hurrians, Guti, Kassites, Elamites and Lullubi, who periodically raided Sumerian, Akkadian and Assyrian cities, and the range still forms a barrier between the Mesopotamian plain and the Iranian plateau.
GPS surveys show the collision is still active, with Arabia pressing north and the range and Iranian plateau still rising. Pastoralists such as the Lurs, Bakhtiari, Kurds and Qashqai move their herds between eastern slopes in summer and western slopes in winter, and many Bakhtiari remain nomadic. Cities along the foothills include Sulaymaniyah, Kermanshah, Khorramabad and Shiraz. For the Kurds, native to the northwestern and central ranges, the mountains' valleys have supported farming and their heights have long served as a natural defence in wartime.
Source: Zagros Mountains
