The geology of Russia, the world's largest country, which extends over much of northern Eurasia, consists of several stable cratons and sedimentary platforms bounded by orogenic (mountain) belts.
European Russia is on the East European craton, at the heart of which is a complex of igneous and metamorphic rocks dating back to the Precambrian. The craton is bounded on the east by the long tract of compressed and highly deformed rock that constitutes the Ural orogen. In Asiatic Russia, the area between the Ural Mountains and the Yenisei River is the young West Siberian Plain. East of the Yenisei River is the ancient Central Siberian Plateau, extending to the Lena River. East of the Lena River there is the Verhoyansk-Chukotka collision zone, stretching to the Chukchi Peninsula.
The orogens within Russia belong to the Baltic Shield, the Timanides, the Urals, the Altai Mountains, the Ural-Mongolian epipaleozoic orogen and the northwestern part of the Pacific orogeny. The country's highest mountains, the Caucasus, are confined to younger orogens.
The European part of Russia lies on the East European platform, a region up to 3,000 kilometres (1,900 mi) wide covered by more than 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) of metamorphosed sediments dating back to the Riphean stage (middle to late Proterozoic, from 1,400 to 800 million years ago). These sediments lie on the East European craton, a remnant of Precambrian continental crust composed of magmatic and metamorphic rocks.[1] The East European craton itself was created between 2.0 and 1.7 billion years ago when the microcontinents of Fennoscandia, Sarmatia and Volgo-Uralia collided.[2]
The Timan Ridge (Тиманский кряж – Timansky Kryazh) lies west of the Northern Ural mountains. It strikes northwest–southeast, extending from the settlement of Troitsko-Pechorsk to the Kanin Peninsula. This ridge can be correlated with outcrops on the Varanger Peninsula which together form the Timan-Varanger belt.[3]The Timan-Varanger belt consists of Neoproterozoic (late Precambrian) sediments that were metamorphosed and deformed during the Timanian (or Baikalian) orogeny, a late Neoproterozoic mountain-building event coincident with the Cadomian orogeny in western Europe.[3]
The Timan-Pechora Basin is a sedimentary basin that lies between the Timan Ridge and the Urals foreland basin. The basin extends into the southern part of the Barents sea and includes Kolguyev Island. It is covered by 6 to 12 kilometres (3.7 to 7.5 mi) of sediments that were deposited during a series of marine regression and transgression events from the Proterozoic to the Cenozoic. The eastern basin was deformed when the Ural mountains were formed.[4] The Basin is further divided into the Izhma-Pechora basin, Pechora-Kolva basin, Khoreiver basin and the Northern Pre-Urals.[5]