Russian table

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Geological map of Europe. The Russian tablet is characterized by a comparatively simple geology with broad outcrops of Paleozoic (purple tones), Mesozoic (green tones) and Cenozoic (yellow tones) rocks.
View over a rather poor relief landscape of the Russian platform, the Vyatka lowlands in Kirov . This part of the table is dominated by Permian terrestrial sediments .
Steep bank on the coast of Osmussaar (Estonia) with marine limestones of the Ordovician . Similar old, superficial sediments in Central Europe are always folded and sometimes metamorphic .
Saarina juliae , a fossil of uncertain assignment that comes from the oldest sediments on the Russian tablet, the Vendium

The Russian Table (also called the Russian Platform , Eastern European Table or Eastern European Platform ) is the part of the Eastern European craton (Fennosarmatia, Baltica) covered by Phanerozoic sediments . It occupies most of Eastern Europe and roughly corresponds geographically to the Eastern European lowlands .

physical geography

The Russian panel extends from the southeastern Baltic Sea, the southern shore of Lake Ladoga and Lake Onega and the Arctic continental slope in the north to the Black Sea , the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea in the south and about from the Vistula line and the Carpathian foreland in the west to to the Urals in the east. In contrast to the Eastern European lowlands, however, it does not extend into the eastern Balkans and eastern Fennoscandinavia . In the southwest part of the table is the relatively incomplete Podolian shield . The southern edge of the panel overlaps with the northern edge of the eastern Paratethys .

The Russian tablet is characterized by terrain with a rather weak relief with height differences of mostly barely more than 100 meters and absolute heights of rarely more than 200 meters above sea level. A larger mountain range, more noticeable on the map, is the Timan Ridge in the northeast, which rises more than 450 meters above sea level. However, this is not made up of table sediments, but represents an old fold belt. It is structurally more similar to the Urals than the rest of the Russian table. The area between the Timan Ridge and the northern Urals is called the Pechora Basin. The lowest points are found in the sometimes board-level, hundreds of kilometers wide lowlands , which were raised by the large rivers . The three largest are Volga , Don and Dnepr .

geology

In contrast to the Baltic Shield , on which the heavily tectonically stressed crystalline of the Precambrian basement of the Eastern European Craton is exposed, these crystalline rocks on the Russian Table are covered by virtually unfolded Phanerozoic sediments. The age of the superficial outcropping sediments tends to decrease from north to south and from west to east. Unlike in southern Central Europe or in Western Europe, but very similar to the Interior Platform of eastern North America, the surface geology in many regions of the Russian Table hardly changes over many hundreds of kilometers.

The sediment thicknesses of the overburden depend on the morphology or subsidence of the cratonal basement. So-called syneklises , d. H. Large-scale depressions in the basement or relatively strongly subsident areas with higher overburden thickness (e.g. the Baltic-Belarusian Syneklise and the Moscow Syneklise), differentiated from anteclises , bulges (thresholds, "uplifts") of the basement with reduced thickness of the overburden ( e.g. Voronezh anteclise).

Due to its geology, which is dominated by unfolded sediments, the Russian tablet is relatively poor in valuable (metallic) mineral resources, because these are preferentially enriched through igneous and metamorphic processes. Significantly, the deposits of the Kursk iron ore province (Voronesh-Anteklise) are mostly located in the basement. In the actual table sediments there are more significant deposits only where the subsidence of the craton and thus also the sediment accumulation rates were relatively high and the sediment thicknesses are correspondingly high today. So there are coal lagerstätten in space Vorkuta in the Pechora Basin and in the Donets Basin , the large coalfield in eastern Ukraine and neighboring parts of Russia. Crude oil and natural gas can also be found in the western Ural Foreland ("Cis-Ural" Russian: Приурал, Pri-Ural '), especially in the Timan-Pechora region, and in the Caspian Depression. Larger rock and potash salt deposits are also represented in the Cis-Urals . The sedimentary copper deposits ("copper sandstone") of the Cis-Urals, for example the Kargaly district in the Orenburg area, are only of historical importance .

In addition, the table sediments of the Russian Platform contain numerous important fossil sites. These include, for example, the Vendic and early Cambrian localities with early complex multicellular cells ( metazoa ), sites of Silurian and therefore very early bony fish and Devonian tetrapodomorpha (so-called "fish apods", such as Panderichthys and Eusthenopteron ) in the north and west of the table, as well as numerous important localities amniote the Permian and early Triassic to the south and / or east, including the oldest archosaurs Archosaurus rossicus from the Upper Permian of Vyazniki (Moscow Syneklise) or large Pareiasaurier scutosaurus Karpinskii from the Permian the area around Kotlas (Mesen-Syneklise). The copper sandstone of the Cis-Urals was already important as a find horizon of Permian land vertebrates in the middle of the 19th century.

swell

  • Franz Neubauer: Geology of Europe. In: Benedetto De Vivo, Bernhard Grasemann, Kurt Stywe (Ed.): Geology. Vol. IV. EOLSS Publishers, 2009, ISBN 978-1-848-26457-1

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wilhelm Petrascheck, Walther Emil Petrascheck: Deposit theory: A short textbook of the mineral resources in the earth. Springer-Verlag, Vienna 1950, ISBN 978-3-7091-3918-9 , p. 60
  2. ↑ VB Dagelaysky: The Voronezh crystalline massif. Pp. 155-172 in: C. Gillen, DV Rundqvist (ed.): Precambrian Ore Deposits of the East European and Siberian Cratons. Developments in Economic Geology. Vol. 30, 1997, pp. 160 ff.
  3. ^ Jörg Stadelbauer: Space, resources and population. In: Federal Center for Political Education (ed.): Russia. Information on political education. Issue 281, 2003 ( HTML Version )
  4. ^ Sandra J. Lindquist: The Timan-Pechora Basin Province of Northwest Arctic Russia: Domanik - Paleozoic Total Petroleum System. US Geological Survey Open-File Report 99-50-GUS Geological Survey, Department of the Interior, Washington, DC 1999 ( online )
  5. ↑ z. B. Andrei Yu. Ivantsov, Mikhail A. Fedonkin: Conulariid-like fossil from the Vendian of Russia: a metazoan clade across the Proterozoic / Palaeozoic boundary. Paleontology. Vol. 45, No. 6, 2002, pp. 1219-1229, doi : 10.1111 / 1475-4983.00283
  6. ↑ z. B. Jerzy Dzik, Kazimiera Lendzion: The oldest arthropods of the East European Platform. Lethaia. Vol. 21, No. 1, 1988, pp. 29-38, doi : 10.1111 / j.1502-3931.1988.tb01749.x
  7. ↑ z. B. Walter Gross: Lophosteus superbus Pander, a teleostome from the Silurian Oesels. Lethaia. Vol. 2, No. 1, 1969, pp. 15-47, doi : 10.1111 / j.1502-3931.1969.tb01249.x
  8. ↑ z. B. Emilia J. Vorobjewa: Some peculiarities in the skull structure of Panderichthys rhombolepis (large), (Pisces, Crossopterygii). Palaeontographica, Division A. Vol. A143, No. 1-6, 1973, pp. 221-229
  9. ↑ z. B. Ivars Zupiņš: A New Tristichopterid (Pisces, Sarcopterygii) from the Devonian of Latvia. Proceedings of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. Section B. Natural, Exact, and Applied Sciences. Vol. 62, No. 1-2, 2008, pp. 40-46, doi : 10.2478 / v10046-008-0007-0
  10. ^ Andrei G. Sennikov, Valerii K. Golubev: Vyazniki Biotic Assemblage of the Terminal Permian. Paleontological Journal. Vol. 40, Supplementum No. 4, 2006, pp. S475-S481, doi : 10.1134 / S0031030106100078
  11. ↑ Vladimir P. Amalitzky: Diagnoses of the new forms of Vertebrates and Plants from the Upper Permian on North Dvina. Известия Российской Академии Наук. Vol. 16, 1922, pp. 329-340.
  12. ^ Herrmann von Meyer: Reptiles from the copper sandstone of the West Ural Orenburg governorate. Palaeontographica. Vol. 15, No. 3, 1866, pp. 97–130 ( archive.org )