17.11 Eurasia

The origin of the largest of the continents-Eurasia – goes to the very beginning of our planet. Basically, it was represented by an archipelago of giant islands, rising above the surface of the vast seas which then covered much of the world. These islands were five in number: the Scandinavian shield in the northwest; the Siberian shield, largest of all, in the north; the Chinese shield in the east; the Thailand – Cambodjian in the southeast; and the Indian shield in the south.

The seas above which these islands rose in these earliest days of the earth’s formation have disappeared, but two of them, the Tethys and the Uralian existed for so long that they played an important role in the history of Old World flora and fauna.

The Tethys was the southern of these two enormous bodies of water: it reached from the Alps and the Mediterranean basin all the way to the Timor Sea in the Indonesian archipelago, covering the entire width of southern Asia, Turkey, Iran, the Himalayas and Vietnam. Its shorelines changed during the more than 560 million years of its existence. Some 36 million years ago the Tethys began to dry up, eventually leaving behind it some of the familiar contours of the lands we know today. Great upheavals of the earth’s crust gave rise to the Alps and the Himalayas, isolated its entire central area, and the two ends of this enormous sea became separated by thousands of miles of emerged land.

But the common parentage of the Mediterranean and the seas around Japan is still evident in the great resemblance of the fishes found in this widely separated waters: by contrast, the Mediterranean and the Red sea, separated by only a hundred miles or so of land, have quite different fishes, and it wasn’t until the Suez Canal was cut in 1869 that they began to mix.

The second and more northern sea, the Uralian ran north from the Tethys to what is now the Arctic Ocean and it separated the Siberian from the Scandinavian shields. About 240 million years ago, what were to be the Ural mountains began to emerge. There was a general rising of land which lifted the level of the continent – to be above the waves, giving Eurasia its shape. The Ural Sea disappeared – but only for a while. Succeeding upheavals and subsidences of the continental crust created new seas separating east from west more than once before the continent was again reunited. Thus Eurasia, as we know it today has existed only for about 25 million years.

17.12 Ural Mountains

The Ural mountain range stretching for 2500 kilometres, runs along the meridian from cold tundra in the north to the arid semi-desert in the south, separating the European part of Russia from the Asian one.

These are not mountains like you find in the Caucasus or the Crimea where there is a brilliant sunshine and luxuriant and exotic vegetation. These mountains are just part and parcel of that same Central Russia, those same fir groves, but with hillocks, those same meadows carpeted with dandelions and clover, but undulating.

The Urals ridge adhered in a long narrow bundle to the so-called Russian platform, forming its eastern edge. The range took shape some 300.000.000 years ago, and, although it survived it was eroded. The Urals were lifted again by a fresh upsurge of the earth’s forces, reaching a height of 1.895 metres above sea level in the north (Mount Narodnaya) and 1.640 metres (Mount Yamantay) in the south.

Over millions of years water, wind, heat, frost and creatures have eaten away and eroded the Ural mountains and laid bare the wealth concealed in them. We can count as many as a thousand minerals there, about half of all known minerals on our planet. There are more than 12 000 places in the Urals where minerals have been prospected. Among these minerals there are the platinum, nickel, chromium, copper. A streak of grey Ural granites stretches along the mountain sides. The granites brought with them gold and precious stones from lesser depths. Gems of rare beauty have been crystallized in the veins in the granite. Boron is responsible for the formation of tourmaline of different colors ( red, black, green). There are also jaspers, emeralds, rubies, sapphires, aquamarines and amethysts, beautiful stones with beautiful names.

Where the magma has serged upwards from the depths and come into contact with the ancient limestone rich deposits of iron ores have been formed like that of the well-known Mount Magnitnaya in the South. There are also great deposits of coal, oil and other mineral resources.