The East European Craton (EEC) is the core of the

Baltica Baltica is a paleocontinent that formed in the Paleoproterozoic and now constitutes northwestern Eurasia, or Europe north of the Trans-European Suture Zone and west of the Ural Mountains. The thick core of Baltica, the East European Craton, is mo ...

proto-

plate Plate may refer to: Cooking * Plate (dishware), a broad, mainly flat vessel commonly used to serve food * Plates, tableware, dishes or dishware used for setting a table, serving food and dining * Plate, the content of such a plate (for example: ...

and consists of three crustal regions/segments:

Fennoscandia __NOTOC__ Fennoscandia (Finnish language, Finnish, Swedish language, Swedish and no, Fennoskandia, nocat=1; russian: Фенноскандия, Fennoskandiya) or the Fennoscandian Peninsula is the geographical peninsula in Europe, which includes ...

to the northwest, Volgo-Uralia to the east, and

Sarmatia The Sarmatians (; grc, Σαρμαται, Sarmatai; Latin: ) were a large confederation of ancient Eastern Iranian equestrian nomadic peoples of classical antiquity who dominated the Pontic steppe from about the 3rd century BC to the 4th centur ...

to the south. Fennoscandia includes the

Baltic Shield The Baltic Shield (or Fennoscandian Shield) is a segment of the Earth's crust belonging to the East European Craton, representing a large part of Fennoscandia, northwestern Russia and the northern Baltic Sea. It is composed mostly of Archean and ...

(also referred to as the Fennoscandian Shield) and has a diversified accretionary Archaean and early

Proterozoic The Proterozoic () is a geological eon spanning the time interval from 2500 to 538.8million years ago. It is the most recent part of the Precambrian "supereon". It is also the longest eon of the Earth's geologic time scale, and it is subdivided ...

crust, while Sarmatia has an older Archaean crust. The Volgo-Uralia region has a thick

sedimentary Sedimentary rocks are types of rock (geology), rock that are formed by the accumulation or deposition of mineral or organic matter, organic particles at Earth#Surface, Earth's surface, followed by cementation (geology), cementation. Sedimentati ...

cover, however deep drillings have revealed mostly Archaean crust. There are two shields in the East European Craton: the Baltic/Fennoscandian shield and the Ukrainian shield. The

Ukrainian Shield In geology the Ukrainian Shield (or Ukrainian Crystalline Massif) is the southwest shield of the East European craton. The Ukrainian Shield and the Voronezh Massif consist of 3.2-3.8 Ga Archaean crust in the southwest and east, and 2.3-2.1 Ga ...

and the

Voronezh Massif Voronezh Massif (also Voronezh Anteclise russian: Воронежская антеклиза, or Voronezh Uplift) is a tectonic anteclise in the south of the Central Russian Upland with a high occurrence of the Precambrian basement. It lies to th ...

consists of 3.2-3.8 Ga Archaean crust in the southwest and east, and 2.3-2.1 Ga Early Proterozoic

orogenic belts Orogeny is a mountain building process. An orogeny is an event that takes place at a convergent plate margin when plate motion compresses the margin. An ''orogenic belt'' or ''orogen'' develops as the compressed plate crumples and is uplifted t ...

. The

Ural Mountains The Ural Mountains ( ; rus, Ура́льские го́ры, r=Uralskiye gory, p=ʊˈralʲskʲɪjə ˈɡorɨ; ba, Урал тауҙары) or simply the Urals, are a mountain range that runs approximately from north to south through western ...

are the eastern margin of the East European Craton and mark the Late

Paleozoic The Paleozoic (or Palaeozoic) Era is the earliest of three geologic eras of the Phanerozoic Eon. The name ''Paleozoic'' ( ;) was coined by the British geologist Adam Sedgwick in 1838 by combining the Greek words ''palaiós'' (, "old") and ' ...

orogenic Orogeny is a mountain building process. An orogeny is an event that takes place at a convergent boundary, convergent plate margin when plate motion compresses the margin. An ''orogenic belt'' or ''orogen'' develops as the compressed plate crumpl ...

collision of the East European Craton with the

Siberian craton Siberia, also known as Angaraland (or simply Angara) and Angarida, is an ancient craton in the heart of Siberia. Today forming the Central Siberian Plateau, it was an independent continent before the Permian period. The Verkhoyansk Sea, a passive ...

s. The southern margin of the craton is where Sarmatia is buried beneath thick

Phanerozoic The Phanerozoic Eon is the current geologic eon in the geologic time scale, and the one during which abundant animal and plant life has existed. It covers 538.8 million years to the present, and it began with the Cambrian Period, when anima ...

sediments and the Alpine

orogen An orogenic belt, or orogen, is a zone of Earth's crust affected by orogeny. An orogenic belt develops when a continental plate crumples and is Tectonic uplift, uplifted to form one or more mountain ranges; this involves a series of geological pr ...

s. The intervening Late Palaeozoic

Donbass The Donbas or Donbass (, ; uk, Донба́с ; russian: Донба́сс ) is a historical, cultural, and economic region in eastern Ukraine. Parts of the Donbas are controlled by Russian separatist groups as a result of the Russo-Ukrai ...

Fold Belt, also known as part of the

Dnieper-Donets Rift The Dnieper-Donets Rift or Pripyat-Dnieper-Donets Rift (also referred as a "paleorift" and "aulacogen") is an east-west running rift in the Sarmatian Craton that developed and was most active in the Paleozoic. The rift extends from the Caspian Dep ...

, transects Sarmatia, dividing it into the Ukrainian Shield and the Voronezh Massif. The southwestern boundary is known as the

Trans European Suture Zone The Trans-European Suture Zone (TESZ), also known as the Tornquist Zone, is the crustal boundary between the Precambrian East European Craton and the Phanerozoic orogens of South-Western Europe. The zone runs from the North Sea to the Black Sea. ...

and separates the East European craton from the

s of

Western Europe Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's countries and territories vary depending on context. The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the ancient Mediterranean ...

(e.g.

Carpathians The Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians () are a range of mountains forming an arc across Central Europe. Roughly long, it is the third-longest European mountain range after the Ural Mountains, Urals at and the Scandinavian Mountains at . The ...

). The northwestern margin of the craton is overlaid by the fold-and-thrust Early Paleozoic Caledonian orogen.

Platform basement

The most distinguishable physiographic aspect of the East European Craton is the extensive 3-km and more-thick Riphean (middle to late Proterozoic) sedimentary cover over its 3000-km-wide

platform Platform may refer to: Technology * Computing platform, a framework on which applications may be run * Platform game, a genre of video games * Car platform, a set of components shared by several vehicle models * Weapons platform, a system or ...

area (East European Platform, EEP, also known as the Russian Platform). This is in sharp contrast to the exposed northwest portion of the

, and the

in the southwest. The

lithospheric A lithosphere () is the rigid, outermost rocky shell of a terrestrial planet or natural satellite. On Earth, it is composed of the crust and the portion of the upper mantle that behaves elastically on time scales of up to thousands of years or ...

thickness also varies widely from 150–200 km in

Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...

to 120 km in southern

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

to over 250 km thick in the NE Baltic Shield, with extremely wide thickness fluctuations of the crustal layers. A shield in any

craton A craton (, , or ; from grc-gre, κράτος "strength") is an old and stable part of the continental lithosphere, which consists of Earth's two topmost layers, the crust and the uppermost mantle. Having often survived cycles of merging and ...

is the area of exposed

crystalline A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituents (such as atoms, molecules, or ions) are arranged in a highly ordered microscopic structure, forming a crystal lattice that extends in all directions. In addition, macrosc ...

crust while the other part of the craton is the “

” where the crystalline crust or

basement A basement or cellar is one or more floors of a building that are completely or partly below the ground floor. It generally is used as a utility space for a building, where such items as the furnace, water heater, breaker panel or fuse box, ...

is overlaid by younger sedimentary cover. Thus the crustal segments of the East European Craton comprise both the Baltic Shield and the Ukrainian Shield, and the sedimentary platform basement.

Early tectonics

The East European Craton has a very complex tectonic history with extensive Proterozoic and Paleozoic rifting, a large portion of which is of early deep

mantle plume A mantle plume is a proposed mechanism of convection within the Earth's mantle, hypothesized to explain anomalous volcanism. Because the plume head partially melts on reaching shallow depths, a plume is often invoked as the cause of volcanic hot ...

origin.

References

* Artemieva, Irina M. (2003
"Lithospheric structure, composition, and thermal regime of the East European Craton:implications for the subsidence of the Russian platform"
''Earth and Planetary Science Letters'', 213, 431–446 * Bogdanova, Svetlana V., Gorbatschev, R. and Garetsky, R.G. (2005) ''The East European Craton'', in: Selley, R.C., Cocks, L.R. and Plimer, I.R. (Eds) ''Encyclopedia of Geology'', Amsterdam ; London : Elsevier Academic, 5 vols, , p. 34-49 * Bogdanova, Svetlana V. (2005
"The East European Craton: Some Aspects of the Proterozoic Evolution in its South-West"
''Polskie Towarzystwo Mineralogiczne - Prace Specjalne (Mineralogical Society of Poland – Special Papers), 26, 18–24 * Bogdanova, Svetlana V. (2000
"Palaeoproterozoic Accretion of Sarmatia and Fennoscandia"
''Europrobe News'', 13 June, p. 7–9 * Evins, Paul

University of Oulu, Dept. of Geology, PL 3000, 01401 Oulu, Finland roken link: 3 July 2007* Ruban, Dmitry A., and Yoshioka, Shoichi. (2006
"Late Paleozoic - Early Mesozoic Tectonic Activity within the Donbass (Russian Platform)"
''Trabajos de Geologia'', 25, Univ. de Oviedo, 101-104. {{DEFAULTSORT:East European Craton Cratons Historical geology Economic geology Structural geology Geology of Europe Natural history of Europe