Eastern European level

Location of the Eastern European Plain and its landscapes

The East European Plain covers a very wide ranges large landscape which the biggest uniformly structured landscape shape of Europe , representing the areas west of the Urals in Eastern Europe . In the past it was often referred to as the Eastern European Plain or the Eastern European Lowland .

It is one of the major Russian landscapes , but is divided into various formations according to altitude and geology . The lowlands and lowlands , through which numerous large rivers flow, have heights between a few meters and about 150 m above sea level, while the ridges and hilly regions that interrupt them reach heights between 300 and 472 meters. The highest point is Mount Kamula in the Podolian highlands .

geology

Geologically, a distinction must be made primarily between the large tables with “young” ( Phanerozoic ), flat-layered sedimentary rocks and the “old” (Precambrian) shields of the European continent with intensely folded metamorphic rocks and granitoids . Among the table countries, the Russian table is by far the largest. It extends roughly over half of the Eastern European lowlands. Their boundaries in the south and north-west are the Ukrainian shield and the Baltic shield , which, as Precambrian rump mountains, form a kind of stable framework. In the east, the huge plateau is bounded by the Urals , a mountain range folded in a variscan and raised again in the Tertiary .

The rocks of the Baltic and Ukrainian shields continue for hundreds of kilometers in the underground of the Russian tablet and form its basement . The plains and table lands to the southwest of the Ukrainian shield remain significantly behind the Russian table in their extent. The transition to the northern part of the Caspian Depression in the south-east of the Eastern European lowlands is characterized by the very distinctive heights of the Volga .

expansion

The Eastern European plain - which has a very wavy character in parts - covers almost the entire area of the European part of Russia . However, branches of the plain also extend to the states of Estonia , Latvia , Lithuania , Poland , Belarus , Ukraine , Moldova and Kazakhstan . It is quite difficult to define the boundaries of the area exactly, so - depending on your point of view - some of these states and the following landscapes and places are sometimes not counted on the level.

In the north, the Eastern European Plain borders on the Barents Sea , in the northeast on the Pai-Choi Mountains , in the east on the Ural Mountains and the Ural River . In the south it extends to the Caspian Depression , the northern foothills of the Caucasus and the Black Sea . Further to the west it goes over the Podolische Platte and the Pripyat Marshes , which are traversed by the Pripyat , into the Baltic Ridge (further to the west the North German lowlands join). To the north of this ridge, the plain borders the Gulf of Finland and the Finnish Lake District . To the north-east of Karelia it finally meets the White Sea .