East European Platform
East European Platform is a big, flat area of the East European Craton in Eastern Europe. It runs from the Ural Mountains to the Tornquist Zone and from the Peri-Caspian Basin to the Barents Sea. Over time the area has stretched, folded, and been squeezed. It covers about 6 million square kilometers.
The platform’s rocks form four main layers from bottom to top: a protoplatform of metamorphosed sediments, a quasiplatform of mildly deformed sediments, a cataplatform, and an orthoplatform at the very top. In the Baltic area, Mesoproterozoic Jotnian sediments are an example of a quasiplatform. The oldest continuous sediment cover is from the Vendian period, about 650 million years ago.
Sediment deposition happened in cycles linked to nearby mountain-building events called orogenies—Timanide, Uralian, Hercynian, and Caledonian. The platform hosts many ancient rifts, or aulacogens, some dating back to the Riphean stage of the Proterozoic. In the Late Devonian, rifting and magmatic activity formed the Dnieper-Donets Rift, likely caused by mantle plumes deep inside the Earth.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 16:20 (CET).