1.
Geographic coordinate system
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A geographic coordinate system is a coordinate system used in geography that enables every location on Earth to be specified by a set of numbers, letters or symbols. The coordinates are chosen such that one of the numbers represents a vertical position. A common choice of coordinates is latitude, longitude and elevation, to specify a location on a two-dimensional map requires a map projection. The invention of a coordinate system is generally credited to Eratosthenes of Cyrene. Ptolemy credited him with the adoption of longitude and latitude. Ptolemys 2nd-century Geography used the prime meridian but measured latitude from the equator instead. Mathematical cartography resumed in Europe following Maximus Planudes recovery of Ptolemys text a little before 1300, in 1884, the United States hosted the International Meridian Conference, attended by representatives from twenty-five nations. Twenty-two of them agreed to adopt the longitude of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, the Dominican Republic voted against the motion, while France and Brazil abstained. France adopted Greenwich Mean Time in place of local determinations by the Paris Observatory in 1911, the latitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle between the equatorial plane and the straight line that passes through that point and through the center of the Earth. Lines joining points of the same latitude trace circles on the surface of Earth called parallels, as they are parallel to the equator, the north pole is 90° N, the south pole is 90° S. The 0° parallel of latitude is designated the equator, the plane of all geographic coordinate systems. The equator divides the globe into Northern and Southern Hemispheres, the longitude of a point on Earths surface is the angle east or west of a reference meridian to another meridian that passes through that point. All meridians are halves of great ellipses, which converge at the north and south poles, the prime meridian determines the proper Eastern and Western Hemispheres, although maps often divide these hemispheres further west in order to keep the Old World on a single side. The antipodal meridian of Greenwich is both 180°W and 180°E, the combination of these two components specifies the position of any location on the surface of Earth, without consideration of altitude or depth. The grid formed by lines of latitude and longitude is known as a graticule, the origin/zero point of this system is located in the Gulf of Guinea about 625 km south of Tema, Ghana. To completely specify a location of a feature on, in, or above Earth. Earth is not a sphere, but a shape approximating a biaxial ellipsoid. It is nearly spherical, but has an equatorial bulge making the radius at the equator about 0. 3% larger than the radius measured through the poles, the shorter axis approximately coincides with the axis of rotation
2.
Russian language
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Russian is an East Slavic language and an official language in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and many minor or unrecognised territories. Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of the four living members of the East Slavic languages, written examples of Old East Slavonic are attested from the 10th century and beyond. It is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia and the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages and it is also the largest native language in Europe, with 144 million native speakers in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Russian is the eighth most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers, the language is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Russian is also the second most widespread language on the Internet after English, Russian distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called soft and hard sounds. This distinction is found between pairs of almost all consonants and is one of the most distinguishing features of the language, another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Russian is a Slavic language of the Indo-European family and it is a lineal descendant of the language used in Kievan Rus. From the point of view of the language, its closest relatives are Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Rusyn. An East Slavic Old Novgorod dialect, although vanished during the 15th or 16th century, is considered to have played a significant role in the formation of modern Russian. In the 19th century, the language was often called Great Russian to distinguish it from Belarusian, then called White Russian and Ukrainian, however, the East Slavic forms have tended to be used exclusively in the various dialects that are experiencing a rapid decline. In some cases, both the East Slavic and the Church Slavonic forms are in use, with different meanings. For details, see Russian phonology and History of the Russian language and it is also regarded by the United States Intelligence Community as a hard target language, due to both its difficulty to master for English speakers and its critical role in American world policy. The standard form of Russian is generally regarded as the modern Russian literary language, mikhail Lomonosov first compiled a normalizing grammar book in 1755, in 1783 the Russian Academys first explanatory Russian dictionary appeared. By the mid-20th century, such dialects were forced out with the introduction of the education system that was established by the Soviet government. Despite the formalization of Standard Russian, some nonstandard dialectal features are observed in colloquial speech. Thus, the Russian language is the 6th largest in the world by number of speakers, after English, Mandarin, Hindi/Urdu, Spanish, Russian is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Education in Russian is still a choice for both Russian as a second language and native speakers in Russia as well as many of the former Soviet republics. Russian is still seen as an important language for children to learn in most of the former Soviet republics, samuel P. Huntington wrote in the Clash of Civilizations, During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russian was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi
3.
North Asia
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North Asia or Northern Asia is a subregion of Asia, consisting of Siberia, and Russian Far East in the Asian portion of Russia – the area east of the Ural Mountains. A large part of the region is known as Asian Russia. Most estimates are that there are around 38 million Russians living east of the Ural Mountains, the Indigenous Siberians now are a minority in Siberia/North Asia due to the European-oriented Russification process during the last three centuries. Russian census records indicate they make up only an estimated 10% of the population with the Buryats numbering at 445,175. There are 443,852 Yakuts living in Siberia, according to the 2002 census there are 500,000 Tatars in Siberia, but 300,000 of them are Volga Tatars who settled in Siberia during periods of colonization. Other ethnic groups live in the region and make a significant portion are ethnic Germans. In 1875, Chambers reported the population of Northern Asia to be 8 million, between 1801 and 1914 an estimated 7 million settlers moved from European Russia to Siberia, 85% during the quarter-century before World War I. For geographic and statistical reasons, the UN geoscheme and various classification schemes will not subdivide countries. There are no mountain chains in Northern Asia to prevent air currents from the Arctic flowing down over the plains of Siberia, the geomorphology of Asia in general is imperfectly known, although the deposits and mountain ranges are well known. The Eurasian Plate and the North American Plate meet across the neck of Alaska, following the line of the Aleutian Trench, Northern Asia is built around the Angara Shield, which lies between the Yenisey River and the Lena River. It developed from fragments of Laurasia, whose rocks were mainly Precambrian crystalline rocks, gneisses, and schists and these rocks can be found in the Angara Shield, the Inner Mongolian-Korean Shield, the Ordes Shield and the Southeast Asia Shield. The fragments have been subject to orogenesis around their margins, giving a complex of plateaux, one can find outcrops of these rocks in unfolded sections of the Shields. Their presence has been confirmed below Mesozoic and later sediments, there are three main periods of mountain building in Northern Asia, although it has occurred many times. The Alpine orogeny caused extensive folding and faulting of Mesozoic and early Tertiary sediments from the Tethys geosyncline. Northern Asia was glaciated in the Pleistocene, but this played a significant part in the geology of the area compared to the part that it played in North America. The Scandinavian ice sheet extended to the east of the Urals, North Asia itself has permafrost, ranging in depths from 30 to 600 metres and covering an area of 9.6 million km². Several of the regions are volcanic, with both the Koryak Mountains and the Kamchatka Peninsula having active volcanoes. The Anadyr Plateau is formed from igneous rocks, the Mongolian Plateau has an area of basaltic lavas and volcanic cones
4.
Russia
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Russia, also officially the Russian Federation, is a country in Eurasia. The European western part of the country is more populated and urbanised than the eastern. Russias capital Moscow is one of the largest cities in the world, other urban centers include Saint Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod. Extending across the entirety of Northern Asia and much of Eastern Europe, Russia spans eleven time zones and incorporates a range of environments. It shares maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, the East Slavs emerged as a recognizable group in Europe between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Founded and ruled by a Varangian warrior elite and their descendants, in 988 it adopted Orthodox Christianity from the Byzantine Empire, beginning the synthesis of Byzantine and Slavic cultures that defined Russian culture for the next millennium. Rus ultimately disintegrated into a number of states, most of the Rus lands were overrun by the Mongol invasion. The Soviet Union played a role in the Allied victory in World War II. The Soviet era saw some of the most significant technological achievements of the 20th century, including the worlds first human-made satellite and the launching of the first humans in space. By the end of 1990, the Soviet Union had the second largest economy, largest standing military in the world. It is governed as a federal semi-presidential republic, the Russian economy ranks as the twelfth largest by nominal GDP and sixth largest by purchasing power parity in 2015. Russias extensive mineral and energy resources are the largest such reserves in the world, making it one of the producers of oil. The country is one of the five recognized nuclear weapons states and possesses the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, Russia is a great power as well as a regional power and has been characterised as a potential superpower. The name Russia is derived from Rus, a state populated mostly by the East Slavs. However, this name became more prominent in the later history, and the country typically was called by its inhabitants Русская Земля. In order to distinguish this state from other states derived from it, it is denoted as Kievan Rus by modern historiography, an old Latin version of the name Rus was Ruthenia, mostly applied to the western and southern regions of Rus that were adjacent to Catholic Europe. The current name of the country, Россия, comes from the Byzantine Greek designation of the Kievan Rus, the standard way to refer to citizens of Russia is Russians in English and rossiyane in Russian. There are two Russian words which are translated into English as Russians
5.
Kazakhstan
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Kazakhstan, officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a transcontinental country in northern Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Kazakhstan is the worlds largest landlocked country, and the ninth largest in the world, Kazakhstan is the dominant nation of Central Asia economically, generating 60% of the regions GDP, primarily through its oil/gas industry. It also has vast mineral resources, Kazakhstan is officially a democratic, secular, unitary, constitutional republic with a diverse cultural heritage. Kazakhstan shares borders with Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, the terrain of Kazakhstan includes flatlands, steppe, taiga, rock canyons, hills, deltas, snow-capped mountains, and deserts. Kazakhstan has an estimated 18 million people as of 2014, Given its large area, its population density is among the lowest. The capital is Astana, where it was moved in 1997 from Almaty, the territory of Kazakhstan has historically been inhabited by nomadic tribes. This changed in the 13th century, when Genghis Khan occupied the country as part of the Mongolian Empire, following internal struggles among the conquerors, power eventually reverted to the nomads. By the 16th century, the Kazakh emerged as a distinct group, the Russians began advancing into the Kazakh steppe in the 18th century, and by the mid-19th century, they nominally ruled all of Kazakhstan as part of the Russian Empire. Following the 1917 Russian Revolution, and subsequent civil war, the territory of Kazakhstan was reorganised several times, in 1936, it was made the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the Soviet Union. Kazakhstan was the last of the Soviet republics to declare independence during the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan has worked to develop its economy, especially its dominant hydrocarbon industry. Kazakhstans 131 ethnicities include Kazakhs, Russians, Uzbeks, Ukrainians, Germans, Tatars, the Kazakh language is the state language, and Russian has equal official status for all levels of administrative and institutional purposes. The name Kazakh comes from the ancient Turkic word qaz, to wander, the name Cossack is of the same origin. The Persian suffix -stan means land or place of, so Kazakhstan can be translated as land of the wanderers. Kazakhstan has been inhabited since the Neolithic Age, the regions climate, archaeologists believe that humans first domesticated the horse in the regions vast steppes. Central Asia was originally inhabited by the Scythians, the Cuman entered the steppes of modern-day Kazakhstan around the early 11th century, where they later joined with the Kipchak and established the vast Cuman-Kipchak confederation. Under the Mongol Empire, the largest in history, administrative districts were established. These eventually came under the rule of the emergent Kazakh Khanate, throughout this period, traditional nomadic life and a livestock-based economy continued to dominate the steppe. Nevertheless, the region was the focus of ever-increasing disputes between the native Kazakh emirs and the neighbouring Persian-speaking peoples to the south, at its height the Khanate would rule parts of Central Asia and control Cumania
6.
Ural Mountains
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The mountain range forms part of the conventional boundary between the continents of Europe and Asia. Vaygach Island and the islands of Novaya Zemlya form a continuation of the chain to the north into the Arctic Ocean. The mountains lie within the Ural geographical region and significantly overlap with the Ural Federal District and they have rich resources, including metal ores, coal, precious and semi-precious stones. Since the 18th century the mountains have contributed significantly to the sector of the Russian economy. As attested by Sigismund von Herberstein, in the 16th century Russians called the range by a variety of names derived from the Russian words for rock and it might have been a borrowing from either Turkic stone belt, or Ob-Ugric. From the 13th century, in Bashkortostan there has been a legend about a hero named Ural and he sacrificed his life for the sake of his people and they poured a stone pile over his grave, which later turned into the Ural Mountains. Possibilities include Bashkir үр elevation, upland or Mansi ур ала mountain peak, top of the mountain, tatischev believes that this oronym is set to belt and associates it with the Turkic verb oralu- gird. Dobrodomov suggests a transition from Aral to Ural explained on the basis of ancient Bulgar-Chuvash dialects, hawks believes that the name goes back to the Bashkir folklore Ural-Batyr. Shumilov suggested a Mongolian origin, Khural Uul, that is, the Evenk geographical term era mountain has also been theorized. Finno-Ugrist scholars consider Ural deriving from the Mansi word urr meaning a mountain, turkologists, on the other hand, have achieved majority support for their assertion that ural in Tatar means a belt, and recall that an earlier name for the range was stone belt. During the next few centuries Novgorodians engaged in fur trading with the population and collected tribute from Yugra and Great Perm. The rivers Chusovaya and Belaya were first mentioned in the chronicles of 1396 and 1468, in 1430 the town of Solikamsk was founded on the Kama at the foothills of the Ural, where salt was produced in open pans. Ivan III of Moscow captured Perm, Pechora and Yugra from the declining Novgorod Republic in 1472, with the excursions of 1483 and 1499–1500 across the Ural Moscow managed to subjugate Yugra completely. The Middle and Southern Ural were still largely unavailable and unknown to the Russian or Western European geographers, the Stroganovs land provided the staging ground for Yermaks incursion into Siberia. Yermak crossed the Ural from the Chusovaya to the Tagil around 1581, in 1597 Babinovs road was built across the Ural from Solikamsk to the valley of the Tura, where the town of Verkhoturye was founded in 1598. Customs was established in Verkhoturye shortly thereafter and the road was made the legal connection between European Russia and Siberia for a long time. In 1648 the town of Kungur was founded at the foothills of the Middle Ural. During the 17th century the first deposits of iron and copper ores, mica, gemstones, iron and copper smelting works emerged
7.
Arctic Ocean
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The Arctic Ocean is the smallest and shallowest of the worlds five major oceans. Alternatively, the Arctic Ocean can be seen as the northernmost part of the all-encompassing World Ocean, located mostly in the Arctic north polar region in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere, the Arctic Ocean is almost completely surrounded by Eurasia and North America. It is partly covered by sea ice throughout the year and almost completely in winter, the summer shrinking of the ice has been quoted at 50%. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center uses satellite data to provide a record of Arctic sea ice cover. The Arctic may become ice free for the first time in human history within a few years or by 2040, for much of European history, the north polar regions remained largely unexplored and their geography conjectural. He was probably describing loose sea ice known today as growlers or bergy bits, his Thule was probably Norway, early cartographers were unsure whether to draw the region around the North Pole as land or water. The makers of navigational charts, more conservative than some of the more fanciful cartographers, tended to leave the region blank and this lack of knowledge of what lay north of the shifting barrier of ice gave rise to a number of conjectures. In England and other European nations, the myth of an Open Polar Sea was persistent, john Barrow, longtime Second Secretary of the British Admiralty, promoted exploration of the region from 1818 to 1845 in search of this. In the United States in the 1850s and 1860s, the explorers Elisha Kane, even quite late in the century, the eminent authority Matthew Fontaine Maury included a description of the Open Polar Sea in his textbook The Physical Geography of the Sea. Nevertheless, as all the explorers who travelled closer and closer to the reported, the polar ice cap is quite thick. Fridtjof Nansen was the first to make a crossing of the Arctic Ocean. The first surface crossing of the ocean was led by Wally Herbert in 1969, in a dog sled expedition from Alaska to Svalbard, with air support. The first nautical transit of the pole was made in 1958 by the submarine USS Nautilus. Since 1937, Soviet and Russian manned drifting ice stations have extensively monitored the Arctic Ocean, scientific settlements were established on the drift ice and carried thousands of kilometres by ice floes. In World War II, the European region of the Arctic Ocean was heavily contested, the Arctic Ocean occupies a roughly circular basin and covers an area of about 14,056,000 km2, almost the size of Antarctica. The coastline is 45,390 km long and it is surrounded by the land masses of Eurasia, North America, Greenland, and by several islands. It is connected to the Pacific Ocean by the Bering Strait and to the Atlantic Ocean through the Greenland Sea, countries bordering the Arctic Ocean are, Russia, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Canada and the United States. There are several ports and harbours around the Arctic Ocean In Alaska, in Canada, ships may anchor at Churchill in Manitoba, Nanisivik in Nunavut, Tuktoyaktuk or Inuvik in the Northwest territories
8.
Pacific Ocean
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The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of the Earths oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean in the south and is bounded by Asia and Australia in the west, the Mariana Trench in the western North Pacific is the deepest point in the world, reaching a depth of 10,911 metres. Both the center of the Water Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere are in the Pacific Ocean, the oceans current name was coined by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan during the Spanish circumnavigation of the world in 1521, as he encountered favourable winds on reaching the ocean. He called it Mar Pacífico, which in both Portuguese and Spanish means peaceful sea, important human migrations occurred in the Pacific in prehistoric times. Long-distance trade developed all along the coast from Mozambique to Japan, trade, and therefore knowledge, extended to the Indonesian islands but apparently not Australia. By at least 878 when there was a significant Islamic settlement in Canton much of trade was controlled by Arabs or Muslims. In 219 BC Xu Fu sailed out into the Pacific searching for the elixir of immortality, from 1404 to 1433 Zheng He led expeditions into the Indian Ocean. The east side of the ocean was discovered by Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513 after his expedition crossed the Isthmus of Panama and he named it Mar del Sur because the ocean was to the south of the coast of the isthmus where he first observed the Pacific. Later, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan sailed the Pacific East to West on a Castilian expedition of world circumnavigation starting in 1519, Magellan called the ocean Pacífico because, after sailing through the stormy seas off Cape Horn, the expedition found calm waters. The ocean was often called the Sea of Magellan in his honor until the eighteenth century, sailing around and east of the Moluccas, between 1525 and 1527, Portuguese expeditions discovered the Caroline Islands, the Aru Islands, and Papua New Guinea. In 1542–43 the Portuguese also reached Japan, in 1564, five Spanish ships consisting of 379 explorers crossed the ocean from Mexico led by Miguel López de Legazpi and sailed to the Philippines and Mariana Islands. The Manila galleons operated for two and a half centuries linking Manila and Acapulco, in one of the longest trade routes in history, Spanish expeditions also discovered Tuvalu, the Marquesas, the Cook Islands, the Solomon Islands, and the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific. In the 16th and 17th century Spain considered the Pacific Ocean a Mare clausum—a sea closed to other naval powers, as the only known entrance from the Atlantic the Strait of Magellan was at times patrolled by fleets sent to prevent entrance of non-Spanish ships. On the western end of the Pacific Ocean the Dutch threatened the Spanish Philippines, Spain also sent expeditions to the Pacific Northwest reaching Vancouver Island in southern Canada, and Alaska. The French explored and settled Polynesia, and the British made three voyages with James Cook to the South Pacific and Australia, Hawaii, and the North American Pacific Northwest, one of the earliest voyages of scientific exploration was organized by Spain in the Malaspina Expedition of 1789–1794. It sailed vast areas of the Pacific, from Cape Horn to Alaska, Guam and the Philippines, New Zealand, Australia, and the South Pacific. Growing imperialism during the 19th century resulted in the occupation of much of Oceania by other European powers, and later, Japan, in Oceania, France got a leading position as imperial power after making Tahiti and New Caledonia protectorates in 1842 and 1853 respectively. After navy visits to Easter Island in 1875 and 1887, Chilean navy officer Policarpo Toro managed to negotiate an incorporation of the island into Chile with native Rapanui in 1888, by occupying Easter Island, Chile joined the imperial nations
9.
Mongolia
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Mongolia /mɒŋˈɡoʊliə/ is a landlocked unitary sovereign state in East Asia. Its area is equivalent with the historical territory of Outer Mongolia. It is sandwiched between China to the south and Russia to the north, while it does not share a border with Kazakhstan, Mongolia is separated from it by only 36.76 kilometers. At 1,564,116 square kilometers, Mongolia is the 18th largest and it is also the worlds second-largest landlocked country behind Kazakhstan and the largest landlocked country that does not border a closed sea. The country contains very little land, as much of its area is covered by grassy steppe, with mountains to the north and west. Ulaanbaatar, the capital and largest city, is home to about 45% of the countrys population, approximately 30% of the population is nomadic or semi-nomadic, horse culture is still integral. The majority of its population are Buddhists, the non-religious population is the second largest group. Islam is the dominant religion among ethnic Kazakhs, the majority of the states citizens are of Mongol ethnicity, although Kazakhs, Tuvans, and other minorities also live in the country, especially in the west. Mongolia joined the World Trade Organization in 1997 and seeks to expand its participation in regional economic, the area of what is now Mongolia has been ruled by various nomadic empires, including the Xiongnu, the Xianbei, the Rouran, the Turkic Khaganate, and others. In 1206, Genghis Khan founded the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history. His grandson Kublai Khan conquered China to establish the Yuan dynasty, after the collapse of the Yuan, the Mongols retreated to Mongolia and resumed their earlier pattern of factional conflict, except during the era of Dayan Khan and Tumen Zasagt Khan. In the 16th century, Tibetan Buddhism began to spread in Mongolia, being led by the Manchu-founded Qing dynasty. By the early 1900s, almost one-third of the male population were Buddhist monks. After the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Mongolia declared independence from the Qing dynasty, shortly thereafter, the country came under the control of the Soviet Union, which had aided its independence from China. In 1924, the Mongolian Peoples Republic was declared as a Soviet satellite state, after the anti-Communist revolutions of 1989, Mongolia conducted its own peaceful democratic revolution in early 1990. This led to a multi-party system, a new constitution of 1992, homo erectus inhabited Mongolia from 850,000 years ago. Modern humans reached Mongolia approximately 40,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic, the Khoit Tsenkher Cave in Khovd Province shows lively pink, brown, and red ochre paintings of mammoths, lynx, bactrian camels, and ostriches, earning it the nickname the Lascaux of Mongolia. The venus figurines of Malta testify to the level of Upper Paleolithic art in northern Mongolia, the wheeled vehicles found in the burials of the Afanasevans have been dated to before 2200 BC
10.
China
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China, officially the Peoples Republic of China, is a unitary sovereign state in East Asia and the worlds most populous country, with a population of over 1.381 billion. The state is governed by the Communist Party of China and its capital is Beijing, the countrys major urban areas include Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Tianjin and Hong Kong. China is a power and a major regional power within Asia. Chinas landscape is vast and diverse, ranging from forest steppes, the Himalaya, Karakoram, Pamir and Tian Shan mountain ranges separate China from much of South and Central Asia. The Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, the third and sixth longest in the world, respectively, Chinas coastline along the Pacific Ocean is 14,500 kilometers long and is bounded by the Bohai, Yellow, East China and South China seas. China emerged as one of the worlds earliest civilizations in the basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. For millennia, Chinas political system was based on hereditary monarchies known as dynasties, in 1912, the Republic of China replaced the last dynasty and ruled the Chinese mainland until 1949, when it was defeated by the communist Peoples Liberation Army in the Chinese Civil War. The Communist Party established the Peoples Republic of China in Beijing on 1 October 1949, both the ROC and PRC continue to claim to be the legitimate government of all China, though the latter has more recognition in the world and controls more territory. China had the largest economy in the world for much of the last two years, during which it has seen cycles of prosperity and decline. Since the introduction of reforms in 1978, China has become one of the worlds fastest-growing major economies. As of 2016, it is the worlds second-largest economy by nominal GDP, China is also the worlds largest exporter and second-largest importer of goods. China is a nuclear weapons state and has the worlds largest standing army. The PRC is a member of the United Nations, as it replaced the ROC as a permanent member of the U. N. Security Council in 1971. China is also a member of numerous formal and informal multilateral organizations, including the WTO, APEC, BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the BCIM, the English name China is first attested in Richard Edens 1555 translation of the 1516 journal of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa. The demonym, that is, the name for the people, Portuguese China is thought to derive from Persian Chīn, and perhaps ultimately from Sanskrit Cīna. Cīna was first used in early Hindu scripture, including the Mahābhārata, there are, however, other suggestions for the derivation of China. The official name of the state is the Peoples Republic of China. The shorter form is China Zhōngguó, from zhōng and guó and it was then applied to the area around Luoyi during the Eastern Zhou and then to Chinas Central Plain before being used as an occasional synonym for the state under the Qing
11.
West Siberian Plain
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Much of the plain is poorly drained and consists of some of the worlds largest swamps and floodplains. Important cities include Omsk, Novosibirsk, Tomsk and Chelyabinsk, the West Siberian Plain is located east of Ural Mountains mostly in the territory of Russia. It has been described as the worlds largest unbroken lowland—more than 50 percent is less than 100 metres above sea level—and covers an area of about 2. 6–2. The plain has eight distinct regions, tundra, forest-tundra, northern taiga, middle taiga, southern taiga, sub-taiga forest, forest-steppe. The number of species in the West Siberian Plain ranges from at least 107 in the tundra to 278 or more in the forest-steppe region. The long Yenisei river flows south to north, a distance of 3,530 km to the Arctic Ocean. Together with its tributary Angara, the two rivers flow 5,530 km, the valley formed by the Yenisei acts as a rough dividing line between the West Siberian Plain and the Central Siberian Plateau. Glacial deposits extend as far south as the Ob-Irtysh confluence, forming low hills and ridges. Winters on the West Siberian Plain are harsh and long, the climate of most of the plains is either subarctic or continental. Two of the cities on the plain are Surgut and Nizhnevartovsk. The West Siberian Plain consists mostly of Cenozoic alluvial deposits and is extraordinarily flat, a rise of fifty metres in sea level would cause all land between the Arctic Ocean and Novosibirsk to be inundated. It is a region of the Earths crust that has undergone prolonged subsidence and is composed of deposits from as much as 65,000,000 years ago. Many of the deposits on this plain result from ice dams that reversed the flow of the Ob and Yenisei rivers, redirecting them into the Caspian Sea and it is very swampy and soils are mostly peaty Histosols and, in the treeless northern part, Histels. This is one of the worlds largest areas of peatlands, which are characterized by raised bogs and it is believed that Vasyugan Swamp is the world’s largest single raised bog, covering approximately 51,600 km². In the south of the plain, where permafrost is largely absent, large regions of the plains are flooded in the spring, and marshlands make much of the area unsuitable for agriculture. The principal rivers in the West Siberian Plain are the Ob, Irtysh, there are many lakes and swamps. This area had large petroleum and natural gas reserves, most of Russias oil and gas production was extracted from this area during the 1970s and 80s
12.
Central Siberian Plateau
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The Central Siberian Plateau is made up of sharply demarcated surfaces of varying altitudes occupying most of Siberia between the Yenisei and Lena rivers. It extends over an area of 3.5 million km², the highest point is the Putoran Mountains, rising to 1,701 m. To the north of the plateau are the Putoran Mountains while to the south are the Eastern Sayan, to the east the plateau gives way to the low-lying land of the Yakuts. The Central Siberian Plateau covers one-third of Siberia, the climate is continental with short warm summers and long and very cold winters. Most of the territory is covered with conifer forests, the plateaus major river is the Lower Tunguska. Known geologically as the Siberian Traps, mineral resources here are rich and include coal, iron ore, gold, platinum, diamonds. Economy of Russia — Natural resources The Demise of the Siberian Plume №1 Travel Guide
13.
Siberia
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Siberia is an extensive geographical region, and by the broadest definition is also known as North Asia. Siberia has historically been a part of Russia since the 17th century, the territory of Siberia extends eastwards from the Ural Mountains to the watershed between the Pacific and Arctic drainage basins. It stretches southwards from the Arctic Ocean to the hills of north-central Kazakhstan and to the borders of Mongolia. With an area of 13.1 million square kilometres, Siberia accounts for 77% of Russias land area and this is equivalent to an average population density of about 3 inhabitants per square kilometre, making Siberia one of the most sparsely populated regions on Earth. If it were a country by itself, it would still be the largest country in area, the origin of the name is unknown. Some sources say that Siberia originates from the Siberian Tatar word for sleeping land, another account sees the name as the ancient tribal ethnonym of the Sirtya, a folk, which spoke a language that later evolved into the Ugric languages. This ethnic group was assimilated to the Siberian Tatar people. The modern usage of the name was recorded in the Russian language after the Empires conquest of the Siberian Khanate, a further variant claims that the region was named after the Xibe people. The Polish historian Chycliczkowski has proposed that the name derives from the word for north. He said that the neighbouring Chinese, Arabs and Mongolians would not have known Russian and he suggests that the name is a combination of two words, su and bir. The region is of significance, as it contains bodies of prehistoric animals from the Pleistocene Epoch. Specimens of Goldfuss cave lion cubs, Yuka and another woolly mammoth from Oymyakon, a rhinoceros from the Kolyma River. The Siberian Traps were formed by one of the largest known volcanic events of the last 500 million years of Earths geological history. They continued for a million years and are considered a cause of the Great Dying about 250 million years ago. At least three species of human lived in Southern Siberia around 40,000 years ago, H. sapiens, H. neanderthalensis, the last was determined in 2010, by DNA evidence, to be a new species. Siberia was inhabited by different groups of such as the Enets, the Nenets, the Huns, the Scythians. The Khan of Sibir in the vicinity of modern Tobolsk was known as a prominent figure who endorsed Kubrat as Khagan of Old Great Bulgaria in 630, the Mongols conquered a large part of this area early in the 13th century. With the breakup of the Golden Horde, the autonomous Khanate of Sibir was established in the late 15th century, turkic-speaking Yakut migrated north from the Lake Baikal region under pressure from the Mongol tribes during the 13th to 15th century
14.
Klyuchevskaya Sopka
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Klyuchevskaya Sopka is a stratovolcano, the highest mountain on the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia and the highest active volcano of Eurasia. Its steep, symmetrical cone towers about 100 kilometres from the Bering Sea, the volcano is part of the natural Volcanoes of Kamchatka UNESCO World Heritage Site. Klyuchevskayas first recorded eruption occurred in 1697, and it has been almost continuously ever since. It was first climbed in 1788 by Daniel Gauss and two members of the Billings Expedition. No other ascents were recorded until 1931, when several climbers were killed by flying lava on the descent, as similar dangers still exist today, few ascents are made. Klyuchevskaya Sopka is considered sacred by indigenous peoples, being viewed by them as the location at which the world was created. Other volcanoes in the region are seen with similar spiritual significance, beginning in early January 2007, the Klyuchevskaya volcano began another eruption cycle. Students from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and scientists of the Alaska Volcano Observatory traveled to Kamchatka in the spring to monitor the eruption, on 28 June 2007, the volcano began to experience the largest explosions so far recorded in this eruption cycle. An ash plume from the reached a height of 10 km before drifting eastward, disrupting air traffic from the United States to Asia. Also, significant thermal anomalies have been reported and gas-steam plumes extended roughly 50 km to the north-east from the volcano on 3 March, on 15 October 2012 the volcano had a weak eruption that stopped the following day. On 25 January 2013 the volcano had a weak or lazy-type strombolian eruption that stopped the following day, during January 2013, all volcanoes in the eastern part of Kamchatka —Bezymianny, Karymsky, Kizimen, Klyuchevskaya Sopka, Shiveluch, and Tolbachik have erupted except Kamen. On October 12, Klyuchevskaya had another three days of on-and-off eruptions with anomalies and an ash plume, possibly indicating Strombolian. An explosion from a new cinder cone low on Kliuchevskoi’s southwest flank occurred on October 12, an ash plume rose to altitudes of 6–7 km, and drifted eastward. The eruptions weakened and paused by October 16,2013, on November 19, a strong explosion occurred, and observers reported that ash plumes rose to altitudes of 10–12 km and drifted southeast. The Aviation Color Code was raised to Red, later that day the altitudes of the ash plumes were lower and the eruptions weakened and stopped again. On December 7, activity at Kliuchevskoi and nearby Kizimen significantly increased, having continued during November 29 – December 7, ash plumes rose to altitudes of 5. 5–6 km above sea level and drifted more than 212 km northeast and over 1,000 km east. According to an article, a warning to aircraft was issued for the area around the volcanoes. Video showed gas-and-steam activity, and satellite images detected a daily weak thermal anomaly, on December 9, the Alert Level was lowered to Green when the eruptions stopped
15.
Romanization of Russian
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Romanization of the Russian alphabet is the process of transliterating the Russian language from the Cyrillic script into the Latin alphabet. Scientific transliteration, also known as the International Scholarly System, is a system that has used in linguistics since the 19th century. It is based on the Czech alphabet and formed the basis of the GOST, OST8483 was the first Soviet standard on romanization of Russian, introduced in 16 October 1935. This standard is an equivalent of GOST 16876-71 and was adopted as a standard of the COMECON. GOST7. 79-2000 System of Standards on Information, Librarianship and it is the official standard of both Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Machine readable passports is an adoption of an ICAO stadards for travel documents and it was used in Russian passports for a short period during 2010–2013. The standard was substituted in 2013 by GOST R ISO/IEC 7501-1-2013, which does not contain romanization, ISO/R9, established in 1954 and updated in 1968, was the adoption of the scientific transliteration by the International Organization for Standardization. It covers Russian and seven other Slavic languages, ISO9,1995 is the current transliteration standard from ISO. It is based on its predecessor ISO/R9,1968, which it deprecates, for Russian, the UNGEGN, a Working Group of the United Nations, in 1987 recommended a romanization system for geographical names, which was based on the 1983 version of GOST 16876-71. It may be found in some international cartographic products, American Library Association and Library of Congress romanization tables for Slavic alphabets are used in North American libraries and in the British Library since 1975. The formal, unambiguous version of the system requires some diacritics and two-letter tie characters, British Standard 2979,1958 is the main system of the Oxford University Press, and a variation was used by the British Library to catalogue publications acquired up to 1975. The BGN/PCGN system is relatively intuitive for Anglophones to read and pronounce, the portion of the system pertaining to the Russian language was adopted by BGN in 1944 and by PCGN in 1947. In Soviet international passports, transliteration was based on French rules, in 1997, with the introduction of new Russian passports, a diacritic-free English-oriented system was established by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but this system was also abandoned in 2010. In 2006, GOST52535. 1-2006 was adopted, which defines technical requirements and standards for Russian international passports, in 2010, the Federal Migratory Service of Russia approved Order No. 26, stating that all names in the passports issued after 2010 must be transliterated using GOST52535. 1-2006. The standard was abandoned in 2013, finally in 2013, Order No.320 of the Federal Migratory Service of Russia came into force. It states that all names in the passports must be transliterated using the ICAO system. This system differs from the GOST52535. 1-2006 system in two things, ц is transliterated into ts, ъ is transliterated into ie, Scholarly ¹ Some archaic letters are transcribed in different ways
16.
Region
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In geography, regions are areas that are broadly divided by physical characteristics, human impact characteristics, and the interaction of humanity and the environment. Apart from the continental regions, there are also hydrospheric and atmospheric regions that cover the oceans. The land and water global regions are divided into subregions geographically bounded by large geological features that influence large-scale ecologies, such as plains and features. As a way of describing spatial areas, the concept of regions is important and widely used among the branches of geography. For example, ecoregion is a used in environmental geography, cultural region in cultural geography, bioregion in biogeography. The field of geography that studies regions themselves is called regional geography, where human geography is concerned, the regions and subregions are described by the discipline of ethnography. A region has its own nature that could not be moved, the first nature is its natural environment. The second nature is its physical elements complex that were built by people in the past, the third nature is its socio-cultural context that could not be replaced by new immigrants. Global regions distinguishable from space, and are clearly distinguished by the two basic terrestrial environments, land and water. However, they have generally recognised as such much earlier by terrestrial cartography because of their impact on human geography. They are divided into largest of land regions, known as continents, there are also significant regions that do not belong to either classification, such as archipelago regions that are littoral regions, or earthquake regions that are defined in geology. Continental regions are based on broad experiences in human history. As such they are conceptual constructs, usually lacking distinct boundaries, oceanic division into maritime regions are used in conjunction with the relationship to the central area of the continent, using directions of the compass. To a large extent, major continental regions are mental constructs created by considering an efficient way to large areas of the continents. For the most part, the images of the world are derived as much from academic studies and they are a matter of collective human knowledge of its own planet and are attempts to better understand their environments. Regional geography is a branch of geography that studies regions of all sizes across the Earth and it has a prevailing descriptive character. The main aim is to understand or define the uniqueness or character of a particular region, attention is paid also to regionalization, which covers the proper techniques of space delimitation into regions. Regional geography is considered as a certain approach to study in geographical sciences
17.
Russian conquest of Siberia
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Although outnumbered, the Russians pressured the various family-based tribes into changing their loyalties and establishing distant forts from which they conducted raids. To counter this, Kuchum Khan attempted to centralize his rule by imposing Islam on his subjects, the Russian conquest of Siberia began in July 1580 when some 540 Cossacks under Yermak Timofeyevich invaded the territory of the Voguls, subjects to Küçüm, the Khan of Siberia. They were accompanied by 300 Lithuanian and German slave laborers, whom the Stroganovs had purchased from the tsar, throughout 1581, this force traversed the territory known as Yugra and subdued Vogul and Ostyak towns. At this time, they captured a tax collector of Küçüm. Following a series of Tatar raids in retaliation against the Russian advance, Yermaks forces prepared for a campaign to take Qashliq, the force embarked in May 1582. After a three-day battle on the banks of the river Irtysh, Yermak was victorious against a force of Küçüm Khan. On 29 June, the Cossack forces were attacked by the Tatars, throughout September 1582, the Khan gathered his forces for a defence of Qashliq. A horde of Siberian Tatars, Voguls and Ostyaks massed at Mount Chyuvash to defend against invading Cossacks, on 1 October, a Cossack attempt to storm the Tatar fort at Mount Chyuvash was held off. On 23 October, the Cossacks attempted to storm the Tatar fort at Mount Chyuvash for a time when the Tatars counterattacked. More than a hundred Cossacks were killed, but their gunfire forced a Tatar retreat, the forces of the Khan retreated, and Yermak entered Qashliq on 26 October. Küçüm Khan retreated into the steppes and over the few years regrouped his forces. He suddenly attacked Yermak on 6 August 1584 in the dead of night, the remains of Yermaks forces under the command of Mescheryak retreated from Qashliq, destroying the city as they left. In 1586 the Russians returned, and after subduing the Khanty, the Tatar tribes that were submissive to Küçüm Khan suffered from several attacks by the Russians between 1584–1595, however, Küçüm Khan would not be caught. Finally, in August 1598 Küçüm Khan was defeated at the Battle of Urmin near the river Ob, in the course of the fight the Siberian royal family were captured by the Russians. However, Küçüm Khan escaped yet again, the Russians took the family members of Küçüm Khan to Moscow and there they remained as hostages. The descendants of the family became known as the Princes Sibirsky. Despite his personal escape, the capture of his family ended the political and military activities of Küçüm Khan and he had been in contact with the tsar and had requested that a small region on the banks of the Irtysh River would be granted as his dominion. This was rejected by the tsar who proposed to Küçüm Khan that he come to Moscow, however, the old khan did not want to suffer from such contempt and preferred staying in his own lands to comforting himself in Moscow
18.
Drainage divide
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A drainage divide, water divide, divide, ridgeline, watershed, water parting, is the line that separates neighbouring drainage basins. In hilly country, the divide lies along topographical ridges, and may be in the form of a range of hills or mountains. In flat country—especially where the ground is marshy—the divide may be harder to discern, a valley floor divide is a low drainage divide that runs across a valley, sometimes created by deposition or stream capture. Settlements are often built on valley-floor divides in the Alps, examples are Eben im Pongau, Kirchberg in Tirol and Waidring. Extremely low divides with heights of less than two metres are found on the North German Plain within the Urstromtäler, for example, between Havel and Finow in the Eberswalde Urstromtal. In marsh deltas such as the Okavango, the largest drainage area on earth, or in large areas, such as the Finnish Lakeland. Another case is bifurcation, where the watershed is effectively in the river bed, in pre-industrial times, water divides were crossed at portages. Later, canals connected adjoining drainage basins, a key problem in such canals is ensuring a sufficient water supply, category, Drainage basins List of watershed topics European watershed Scottish watershed River source
19.
Drainage basin
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A drainage basin or catchment area is any area of land where precipitation collects and drains off into a common outlet, such as into a river, bay, or other body of water. Drainage basins connect into other drainage basins at elevations in a hierarchical pattern, with smaller sub-drainage basins. Other terms used to describe drainage basins are catchment, catchment basin, drainage area, river basin and water basin. In closed drainage basins the water converges to a point inside the basin, known as a sink, which may be a permanent lake. The drainage basin acts as a funnel by collecting all the water within the covered by the basin. Each drainage basin is separated topographically from adjacent basins by a perimeter, drainage basins are similar but not identical to hydrologic units, which are drainage areas delineated so as to nest into a multi-level hierarchical drainage system. Hydrologic units are defined to allow multiple inlets, outlets, or sinks, in a strict sense, all drainage basins are hydrologic units but not all hydrologic units are drainage basins. Drainage basins of the oceans and seas of the world. Grey areas are endorheic basins that do not drain to the oceans, the following is a list of the major ocean basins, About 48. 7% of the worlds land drains to the Atlantic Ocean. The two major mediterranean seas of the world also flow to the Atlantic, The Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico basin includes most of the U. S. The Mediterranean Sea basin includes much of North Africa, east-central Africa, Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, Turkey, and the areas of Israel, Lebanon. Just over 13% of the land in the world drains to the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Oceans drainage basin also comprises about 13% of Earths land. It drains the eastern coast of Africa, the coasts of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, the Indian subcontinent, Burma, antarctica comprises approximately eight percent of the Earths land. The five largest river basins, from largest to smallest, are the basins of the Amazon, the Río de la Plata, the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi. The three rivers that drain the most water, from most to least, are the Amazon, Ganga, endorheic drainage basins are inland basins that do not drain to an ocean. Around 18% of all land drains to endorheic lakes or seas or sinks, the largest of these consists of much of the interior of Asia, which drains into the Caspian Sea, the Aral Sea, and numerous smaller lakes. Some of these, such as the Great Basin, are not single drainage basins but collections of separate, in endorheic bodies of standing water where evaporation is the primary means of water loss, the water is typically more saline than the oceans. An extreme example of this is the Dead Sea, drainage basins have been historically important for determining territorial boundaries, particularly in regions where trade by water has been important
20.
Yenisei River
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The Yenisei, Buryat, Горлог мүрэн, Gorlog müren, Tyvan, Улуг-Хем, Ulug-Khem, Khakas, Ким суг, Kim sug also Romanized Yenisey, Enisei, Jenisej, is the largest river system flowing to the Arctic Ocean. It is the central of the three great Siberian rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean, the maximum depth of the Yenisei is 24 metres and the average depth is 14 metres. The depth of river outflow is 32 metres and inflow is 31 metres, the river flows through Tuva, Khakassia, and the city of Krasnoyarsk. Its tributaries include the Angara, Nizhnyaya Tunguska, and Tuba rivers, the Yenisei River basin is home to 55 native fish species, including two endemics, Gobio sibiricus and Thymallus nigrescens. The grayling is restricted to Khövsgöl Nuur and its tributaries, the basin is also home to many salmonids and the Siberian sturgeon. The Yenisei River valley is habitat for flora and fauna, with Siberian pine. In prehistoric times Scots pine, Pinus sylvestris, was abundant in the Yenisei River valley circa 6000 BC, there are also numerous bird species present in the watershed, including, for example, the hooded crow, Corvus cornix. The Taimyr reindeer herd, a migrating tundra reindeer, the largest reindeer herd in the world, the first team to navigate the Yeniseis entire length, including its violent upper tributary in Mongolia, was an Australian-Canadian effort completed in September 2001. Ben Kozel, Tim Cope, Colin Angus and Remy Quinter were on this team, both Kozel and Angus wrote books detailing this expedition, and a documentary was produced for National Geographic Television. A canal inclined plane was built on the river in 1985 at the Krasnoyarsk Dam, ancient nomadic tribes such as the Ket people and the Yugh people lived along its banks. The Ket, numbering about 1000, are the only survivors today of those who lived throughout central southern Siberia near the river banks. Their extinct relatives included the Kotts, Assans, Arins, Baikots, the modern Ket lived in the eastern middle areas of the river before being assimilated politically into Russia during the 17th through 19th centuries. Wheat from the Yenisei was sold by Muslims and Uighurs during inadequate harvests to Bukhara, russians first reached the upper Yenisei in 1605, travelling from the Ob River, up the Ket River, portaging and then down the Yenisei as far as the Sym River. Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric station Yenisey Krasnoyarsk This article incorporates text from a now in the public domain, Chisholm, Hugh. Photos of river around Krasnoyarsk area at Boston. com William Barr, German paddle-steamers on the Yenisey 1878-84, The Journal of the Hakluyt Society, Geographic data related to Yenisei River at OpenStreetMap
21.
Australia
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Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and numerous smaller islands. It is the worlds sixth-largest country by total area, the neighbouring countries are Papua New Guinea, Indonesia and East Timor to the north, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to the north-east, and New Zealand to the south-east. Australias capital is Canberra, and its largest urban area is Sydney, for about 50,000 years before the first British settlement in the late 18th century, Australia was inhabited by indigenous Australians, who spoke languages classifiable into roughly 250 groups. The population grew steadily in subsequent decades, and by the 1850s most of the continent had been explored, on 1 January 1901, the six colonies federated, forming the Commonwealth of Australia. Australia has since maintained a liberal democratic political system that functions as a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states. The population of 24 million is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard, Australia has the worlds 13th-largest economy and ninth-highest per capita income. With the second-highest human development index globally, the country highly in quality of life, health, education, economic freedom. The name Australia is derived from the Latin Terra Australis a name used for putative lands in the southern hemisphere since ancient times, the Dutch adjectival form Australische was used in a Dutch book in Batavia in 1638, to refer to the newly discovered lands to the south. On 12 December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted, in 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially as Australia. The first official published use of the term Australia came with the 1830 publication of The Australia Directory and these first inhabitants may have been ancestors of modern Indigenous Australians. The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, were originally horticulturists, the northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by fishermen from Maritime Southeast Asia. The first recorded European sighting of the Australian mainland, and the first recorded European landfall on the Australian continent, are attributed to the Dutch. The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken captained by Dutch navigator, Willem Janszoon. He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, the Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent New Holland during the 17th century, but made no attempt at settlement. William Dampier, an English explorer and privateer, landed on the north-west coast of New Holland in 1688, in 1770, James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain. The first settlement led to the foundation of Sydney, and the exploration, a British settlement was established in Van Diemens Land, now known as Tasmania, in 1803, and it became a separate colony in 1825. The United Kingdom formally claimed the part of Western Australia in 1828. Separate colonies were carved from parts of New South Wales, South Australia in 1836, Victoria in 1851, the Northern Territory was founded in 1911 when it was excised from South Australia
22.
Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
23.
Gulag
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The Gulag was the government agency that administered and controlled the Soviet forced-labor camp system during Joseph Stalins rule from the 1930s up until the 1950s. The term is commonly used to reference any forced-labor camp in the Soviet Union. The camps housed a range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners. Large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas, the Gulag is recognized as a major instrument of political repression in the Soviet Union. The agencys full name was the Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and it was administered first by the State Political Administration, later by the NKVD and in the final years by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The internment system grew rapidly, reaching a population of 100,000 in the 1920s, the author likened the scattered camps to a chain of islands and as an eyewitness he described the Gulag as a system where people were worked to death. Natalya Reshetovskaya, the wife of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, said in her memoirs that The Gulag Archipelago was based on folklore as opposed to objective facts. In March 1940, there were 53 Gulag camp directorates and 423 labor colonies in the USSR, todays major industrial cities of the Russian Arctic, such as Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Magadan, were originally camps built by prisoners and run by ex-prisoners. About 14 million people were imprisoned in the Gulag labor camps from 1929 to 1953, according to some estimates, the total population of the camps varied from 510,307 in 1934 to 1,727,970 in 1953. According with other estimates, at the beginning of 1953 the total number of prisoners in prison camps was more than 2.4 million of more than 465,000 were political prisoners. The institutional analysis of the Soviet concentration system is complicated by the distinction between GULAG and GUPVI. In many ways the GUPVI system was similar to GULAG and its major function was the organization of foreign forced labor in the Soviet Union. The top management of GUPVI came from the GULAG system, the major noted distinction from GULAG was the absence of convicted criminals in the GUPVI camps. Otherwise the conditions in both systems were similar, hard labor, poor nutrition and living conditions, and high mortality rate. According with the estimates, in total, during the period of the existence of GUPVI there were over 500 POW camps. According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934–53. Some independent estimates are as low as 1.6 million deaths during the period from 1929 to 1953. Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time
24.
Siberian Tatar
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Siberian Tatars refers to the indigenous Siberian population of the forests and steppes of South Siberia stretching from somewhat east of the Ural Mountains to the Yenisey river in Russia. The Siberian Tatars call themselves Yerle Qalyq, or older inhabitants, the word “Tatar” or “Tadar” is also used as a self-designation by some closely related Siberian ethnic groups, namely the Chulym, Shor, Teleut and Khakas peoples. According to the 2002 census, there are 500,000 Tatars in Siberia, at least 400,000 are ethnic Volga Tatars, who settled in Siberia during periods of colonization. The Volga Tatars are a group who are native to the Volga-Ural region. As of yet, the Siberian Tatars do not have public education available in the Siberian Tatar language, in local schools the lessons are taught only in Russian and Volga Tatar languages. Neither are indigenous to the area and were more than two centuries ago by the ethnic Russian and Volga Tatar settlers. Siberian Tatars represent the West-Sibirid anthropological type, although among Baraba Tatar group classical Tungid type can also sometimes be found, later ethnogenetic processes during the Middle Ages and later periods make Siberian Tatars anthropologically close to Sarts, Kazakhs and Bashkirs. Dermatoglyphic material can be attributed to the circle of the mixed Mongoloid-Caucasoid forms with a significant predominance of the Mongoloid component, Zabolotnie Tatars of the Tobol-Irtysh group are extremely close to the Khanty people. Siberian Tatars historically lived in the vast territory stretching from around the Yenisei river all the way to the area lying somewhat east of the Ural mountains. According to the ambassadors of the Siberian Khanate ruler Yediger Khan, who visited Moscow in 1555, in a decree concerning tribute issued by Ivan the Terrible, the population was given as 40,000. According to the results of the 1897 All-Russia Census, there were 56,957 Siberian Tatars in Tobolsk guberniya and this was the last accurate information about this population. In later censuses, Tatar immigrants from the regions of Russia were also recorded under the classification of Tatar. The Siberian Tatars tried to avoid the census as much as possible, as they believed that it was an attempt to force them to pay the Yasak. Their population in the territory of the current Tyumen Oblast in 1926 was recorded as 70,000, in 1959 as 72,306, in 1970 as 102,859,136,749 in 1979,227,423 in 1989, and 242,325 in 2002. According to the results of the 2002 Russian Census, there were 385,949 Tatars living in the oblasts discussed above, of these Tatars only 9,289 identified as Siberian Tatars. 2002 Russian Census recorded a total of 9,611 Siberian Tatars in Russia, some publications estimated their number in the range of 190, 000-210,000. The term Siberian Tatar covers three autochthonous groups, all Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi madhab, found in southern Siberia and they are remnants of the Khanate of Sibir, which was conquered by Russia in 1582. Geographically, the Siberian Tatars are divided into three groups, each speaking their own dialect
25.
Ugric languages
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The Ugric or Ugrian languages are a branch of the Uralic language family. The term derives from Ugres, an old exonym of the Hungarians, and Yugra and they include three subgroups, Hungarian, Khanty, and Mansi. The last two have traditionally been considered single languages, though their main dialects are sufficiently distinct that they may also be considered small subfamilies of 3–4 languages each, however, recent reconstructions of Uralic have not generally found support for Ugric. Of the three languages, Khanty and Mansi have traditionally been set apart from Hungarian as Ob-Ugric, though features uniting Mansi, PU medial *x, *k, *w generally lenited to *ɣ. It has however been pointed out that changes are applicable to the Samoyedic languages as well. The consonant cluster *lm is in the Ugric languages mostly reduced to plain /m/, the reverse has also been suggested—Hungarian and Mansi retaining the original form of the numeral, whereas Khanty and all the Finno-Permic languages would have innovated /l/ for some reason. The three Ugric varieties also share the lateralization of Proto-Uralic *δ to *l, but it is possible this postcedes the emergence of retroflex *ɭ from PU *l in Khanty. Another possible counterargument is the similar lateralization of the palatalized counterpart *δ́ → Mansi /lʲ/, in Khanty the reflex is /j/, whereas instances of /lʲ/ also exist, which may suggest a separate development. An original *ĺ is no longer reconstructed for older stages of Uralic, however, an innovation clearly limited to the Ugric languages is the development of *ŋ to *ŋk, though there are numerous exceptions in each language to this. The development of the system remains subject to interpretation. All three Ugric branches contrast vowel length, in Hungarian this is late, generally derived by compensatory lengthening after loss of unstressed vowels, for example, PU *ńïxli arrow → Hungarian nyíl, but PU *mïksa liver → Hungarian máj. Remnants of original stem vowels are found in the oldest Hungarian records, such as PU *konta group. The Ugric languages share considerable amounts of common lexicon not found in the other Uralic languages and this includes both basic vocabulary, e. g. fire as well as more specialized terminology, particularly the word for horse and related items such as saddle. Some loanwords from such sources into Ugric are known as well, perhaps most prominently the numeral 7, *θäpt → H hét, M сат /sat/, names of two of the Ugric peoples are cognate as well, Hungarian magyar Hungarian can be equated with Mansi. A related word in Khanty denotes a specific phratry, distinct verb conjugations according to the transitivity of the verb. It is sometimes termed as “definite” versus “indefinite” conjugation, because also the definiteness of the object can play a role when selecting between the two, finno-Ugric languages Uralic languages Honti, László. Ugrilainen kantakieli – erheellinen vai reaalinen hypoteesi, vogul, Languages of the World/Materials 158. Hungarian Verbs & Essentials of Grammar
26.
Sibe people
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The Sibe or Xibo are a Tungusic people living mostly in Xinjiang, Jilin and Shenyang in Liaoning. The Sibe form one of the 56 ethnic groups recognized by China. The Sibe are known by variations of their name. According to the Russian scholar Elena P. Lebedeva, the Sibe people originated as a southern and they lived in small town-like settlements, a portion of them nomadic, in the Songyuan and Qiqihar areas of what is now Jilin. When the Buyeo kingdom was conquered by the Xianbei in 286, some historians have theorized that the Xianbei were the direct progenitors of the Sibe, a theory described as politically motivated. Pamela Kyle Crossley writes the Xianbei might have undergone a shift from an earlier Turkic or proto-Mongolian language to a Tungusic one. However, the name Sibe was not used in records during Xianbei times. The Han, Cao Wei, and Jin dynasty at times controlled the Sibe until the advent of the Göktürks, who accorded the Sibe lower status than did the Chinese dynasties. At the height of their territorial dispersion, the Sibe lived in an area bounded by Jilin to the east, Hulunbuir to the west, the Nen River to the north, and the Liao River to the south. After the fall of the Liao dynasty, the Sibe became vassals of the Khorchin Mongols who moved to the Nen, nurhaci, the founder of the Manchu people, routed the Sibe during the battle of Gure in 1593 on his way to founding the Qing dynasty of China. From that point, the Qing contracted the Sibe for logistical support against the Russian Empires expansionism on Chinas northern border, Crossley claims that the Sibe were so well known to Russians moving toward the Pacific that the Russians named Siberia after them. In 1692, the Khorchin dedicated the Sibe, the Gūwalca, the Sibe were incorporated into the Eight Banners and were stationed in Qiqihar and other cities in Northeast China. In 1700, some 20,000 Qiqihar Sibes were resettled in Hohhot,36,000 Songyuan Sibes were resettled in Shenyang, Liaoning. According to Jerry Norman, after a revolt by the Qiqihar Sibes in 1764, in Ili, the Xinjiang Sibe built Buddhist monasteries and cultivated vegetables, tobacco, and poppies. The Sibe population declined after the Qing used them to suppress the Dungan Revolt by the Hui, during the Republic of China, many northeastern Sibe joined anti-Japanese volunteer armies, while northwestern Sibe fought against the Kuomintang during the Ili Rebellion. In 1954, the PRC established the Qapqal Xibe Autonomous County to replace Ningxi County in Xinjiang, historical religions of the Sibe included shamanism and Buddhism. Customary Sibe attire included short buttoned jackets and trousers for men, and close-fitting, long, arranged marriage was common and women had low social status, including no right to inherit property. Nowadays almost all the Sibe wear Western clothing and the clothing is worn by elders during festivals
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Turkic languages
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The Turkic languages are a language family of at least thirty-five languages, spoken by Turkic peoples from Southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean to Siberia and Western China. Turkic languages are spoken as a language by some 170 million people. The Turkic language with the greatest number of speakers is Turkish, spoken mainly in Anatolia and the Balkans, characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender, are universal within the Turkic family. Apparent similarities with the Uralic languages family even caused these families to be regarded as one for a time under the hypothesis of Ural-Altaic languages. Turkic languages are languages, have vowel harmony, extensive agglutination by means of suffixes, and lack of grammatical articles, noun classes. Subject–object–verb word order is universal within the family, the geographical distribution of Turkic-speaking peoples across Eurasia ranges from the North-East of Siberia to Turkey in the West, since the Ottoman era. The two groups shared a religion, Tengrism, and there exists a multitude of evident loanwords between Turkic languages and Mongolic languages, although the loans were bidirectional, today Turkic loanwords constitute the largest foreign component in Mongolian vocabulary. The most famous of these loanwords include lion, gold, the Compendium of the Turkic Dialects, written during the 11th century AD by Kaşgarlı Mahmud of the Kara-Khanid Khanate, constitutes an early linguistic treatment of the family. The Compendium is the first comprehensive dictionary of the Turkic languages and it mainly pertains to the Southwestern branch of the family. The earliest records of the language spoken by Volga Bulgars, the parent to todays Chuvash language, are dated to the 13th–14th centuries AD. With the Turkic expansion during the Early Middle Ages, Turkic languages, in the course of just a few centuries, spread across Central Asia, various terminologies from the Turkic languages have passed into Persian, Hindustani, Russian, Chinese, and to a lesser extent, Arabic. This has obscured the historical developments within each language and/or language group, the modern genetic classification schemes for Turkic are still largely indebted to Samoilovich. It is not clear when two major types of Turkic can be assumed to have actually diverged. With less certainty, the Southwestern, Northwestern, Southeastern and Oghur groups may further be summarized as West Turkic, the following isoglosses are traditionally used in the classification of the Turkic languages, Rhoticisation, e. g. in the last consonant of the word for nine *toqqız. This separates the Oghur branch, which exhibits /r/, from the rest of Turkic, in this case, rhoticisation refers to the development of *-/r/, *-/z/, and *-/d/ to /r/, *-/k/, *-/kh/ in this branch. See Antonov and Jacques on the debate concerning rhotacism and lambdacism in Turkic and this separates Khalaj as a peripheral language. The following table is based upon the classification presented by Lars Johanson The following is a brief comparison of cognates among the basic vocabulary across the Turkic language family. Also, there may be shifts in the meaning from one language to another, in some cases the form given is found only in some dialects of the language, or a loanword is much more common
28.
Paleontology
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Paleontology or palaeontology is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene Epoch. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms evolution and interactions with each other, paleontological observations have been documented as far back as the 5th century BC. The science became established in the 18th century as a result of Georges Cuviers work on comparative anatomy, and developed rapidly in the 19th century. The term itself originates from Greek παλαιός, palaios, i. e. old, ancient, ὄν, on, i. e. being, creature and λόγος, logos, i. e. speech, thought, study. Paleontology lies on the border between biology and geology, but differs from archaeology in that it excludes the study of modern humans. It now uses techniques drawn from a range of sciences, including biochemistry, mathematics. The final quarter of the 20th century saw the development of molecular phylogenetics, molecular phylogenetics has also been used to estimate the dates when species diverged, but there is controversy about the reliability of the molecular clock on which such estimates depend. The simplest definition is the study of ancient life, paleontology is one of the historical sciences, along with archaeology, geology, astronomy, cosmology, philology and history itself. This means that it aims to describe phenomena of the past, hence it has three main elements, description of the phenomena, developing a general theory about the causes of various types of change, and applying those theories to specific facts. Sometimes the smoking gun is discovered by an accident during other research. Paleontology lies on the boundary between biology and geology since paleontology focuses on the record of past life but its source of evidence is fossils. In addition paleontology often uses techniques derived from other sciences, including biology, osteology, ecology, chemistry, techniques developed in engineering have been used to analyse how ancient organisms might have worked, for example how fast Tyrannosaurus could move and how powerful its bite was. As knowledge has increased, paleontology has developed specialised subdivisions, vertebrate paleontology concentrates on fossils of vertebrates, from the earliest fish to the immediate ancestors of modern mammals. Invertebrate paleontology deals with fossils of such as molluscs, arthropods. Paleobotany focuses on the study of plants, but traditionally includes the study of fossil algae. Palynology, the study of pollen and spores produced by plants and protists. Micropaleontology deals with all microscopic fossil organisms, regardless of the group to which they belong, one example is the development of oxygenic photosynthesis by bacteria, which hugely increased the productivity and diversity of ecosystems. This also caused the oxygenation of the atmosphere, together, these were a prerequisite for the evolution of the most complex eukaryotic cells, from which all multicellular organisms are built
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Prehistory
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Prehistory means literally before history, from the Latin word for before, præ, and Greek ιστορία. Neighbouring civilisations were the first to follow, most other civilisations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age. The period when a culture is written about by others, but has not developed its own writing is known as the protohistory of the culture. By definition, there are no records from human prehistory. Clear techniques for dating were not well-developed until the 19th century and this article is concerned with human prehistory as defined here above. There are separate articles for the history of the Earth. However, for the race as a whole, prehistory ends when recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BC. For example, in Egypt it is accepted that prehistory ended around 3200 BC, whereas in New Guinea the end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently. The three-age system is the periodization of prehistory into three consecutive time periods, named for their respective predominant tool-making technologies, Stone Age Bronze Age Iron Age. The notion of prehistory began to surface during the Enlightenment in the work of antiquarians who used the word primitive to describe societies that existed before written records, the first use of the word prehistory in English, however, occurred in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1836. The main source for prehistory is archaeology, but some scholars are beginning to more use of evidence from the natural and social sciences. This view has been articulated by advocates of deep history, human population geneticists and historical linguists are also providing valuable insight for these questions. Human prehistory differs from history not only in terms of its chronology, restricted to material processes, remains and artifacts rather than written records, prehistory is anonymous. Because of this, reference terms that use, such as Neanderthal or Iron Age are modern labels with definitions sometimes subject to debate. Palaeolithic means Old Stone Age, and begins with the first use of stone tools, the Paleolithic is the earliest period of the Stone Age. The early part of the Palaeolithic is called the Lower Palaeolithic, evidence of control of fire by early humans during the Lower Palaeolithic Era is uncertain and has at best limited scholarly support. The most widely accepted claim is that H. erectus or H. ergaster made fires between 790,000 and 690,000 BP in a site at Bnot Yaakov Bridge, Israel. The use of fire enabled early humans to cook food, provide warmth, Early Homo sapiens originated some 200,000 years ago, ushering in the Middle Palaeolithic
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Pleistocene
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The Pleistocene is the geological epoch which lasted from about 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the worlds most recent period of repeated glaciations. The end of the Pleistocene corresponds with the end of the last glacial period, the Pleistocene is the first epoch of the Quaternary Period or sixth epoch of the Cenozoic Era. In the ICS timescale, the Pleistocene is divided into four stages or ages, all of these stages were defined in southern Europe. In addition to this subdivision, various regional subdivisions are often used. Charles Lyell introduced the term pleistocene in 1839 to describe strata in Sicily that had at least 70% of their molluscan fauna still living today and this distinguished it from the older Pliocene Epoch, which Lyell had originally thought to be the youngest fossil rock layer. The Pleistocene has been dated from 2.588 million to 11,700 years before present and it covers most of the latest period of repeated glaciation, up to and including the Younger Dryas cold spell. The end of the Younger Dryas has been dated to about 9640 BC, the IUGS has yet to approve a type section, Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point, for the upper Pleistocene/Holocene boundary. The proposed section is the North Greenland Ice Core Project ice core 75°06 N 42°18 W, the lower boundary of the Pleistocene Series is formally defined magnetostratigraphically as the base of the Matuyama chronozone, isotopic stage 103. Above this point there are notable extinctions of the calcareous nanofossils, Discoaster pentaradiatus, the Pleistocene covers the recent period of repeated glaciations. The name Plio-Pleistocene has, in the past, been used to mean the last ice age. The revised definition of the Quaternary, by pushing back the date of the Pleistocene to 2.58 Ma. Pleistocene climate was marked by repeated glacial cycles in which continental glaciers pushed to the 40th parallel in some places and it is estimated that, at maximum glacial extent, 30% of the Earths surface was covered by ice. In addition, a zone of permafrost stretched southward from the edge of the sheet, a few hundred kilometres in North America. The mean annual temperature at the edge of the ice was −6 °C, during interglacial times, such as at present, drowned coastlines were common, mitigated by isostatic or other emergent motion of some regions. The effects of glaciation were global, antarctica was ice-bound throughout the Pleistocene as well as the preceding Pliocene. The Andes were covered in the south by the Patagonian ice cap, there were glaciers in New Zealand and Tasmania. The current decaying glaciers of Mount Kenya, Mount Kilimanjaro, glaciers existed in the mountains of Ethiopia and to the west in the Atlas mountains. In the northern hemisphere, many glaciers fused into one, the Cordilleran ice sheet covered the North American northwest, the east was covered by the Laurentide
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Permafrost
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In geology, permafrost is ground, including rock or soil, at or below the freezing point of water 0 °C for two or more years. Most permafrost is located in high latitudes, but alpine permafrost may exist at altitudes in much lower latitudes. Ground ice is not always present, as may be in the case of nonporous bedrock, Permafrost accounts for 0. 022% of total water on earth and exists in 24% of exposed land in the Northern Hemisphere. It also occurs subsea on the shelves of the continents surrounding the Arctic Ocean, portions of which were exposed during the last glacial period. A global temperature rise of 1.5 °C above current levels would be enough to start the thawing of permafrost in Siberia, Permafrost is soil, rock or sediment that is frozen for more than two consecutive years. In areas not overlain by ice, it exists beneath a layer of soil, rock or sediment, in practice, this means that permafrost occurs at an average air temperature of -2 °C or colder. Active layer thickness varies with the season, but is 0.3 to 4 meters thick, in the Northern Hemisphere, 24% of the ice-free land area, equivalent to 19 million square kilometers, is more or less influenced by permafrost. Most of this area is found in Siberia, northern Canada, Alaska, beneath the active layer annual temperature swings of permafrost become smaller with depth. The deepest depth of permafrost occurs where geothermal heat maintains a temperature above freezing, above that bottom limit there may be permafrost, whose temperature doesnt change annually—isothermal permafrost. The extent of permafrost varies with the climate, today, a considerable area of the Arctic is covered by permafrost. Overlying permafrost is an active layer that seasonally thaws during the summer. Plant life can be supported only within the active layer since growth can occur only in soil that is fully thawed for some part of the year, thickness of the active layer varies by year and location, but is typically 0. 6–4 m thick. In areas of continuous permafrost and harsh winters, the depth of the permafrost can exceed 1,400 m, Permafrost can also store carbon, both as peat and as methane. Work investigating the permafrost carbon pool size estimates that 1400–1700 Gt of carbon is stored in the northern circumpolar permafrost region, while a recent study that includes stores of the Tibetan Plateau, estimates total carbon pools in the permafrost of the Northern Hemisphere to be 1832 Gt. This large carbon pool represents more carbon than currently exists in all living things, Permafrost typically forms in any climate where the mean annual air temperature is less than the freezing point of water. Exceptions are found in moist-wintered forest climates, such as in Northern Scandinavia and the North-Eastern part of European Russia west of the Urals, fossil cold anomalies in the Geothermal gradient in areas where deep permafrost developed during the Pleistocene persist down to several hundred metres. This is evident from temperature measurements in boreholes in North America, typically, the below-ground temperature varies less from season to season than the air temperature, with mean annual temperatures tending to increase with depth. Thus, if the annual air temperature is only slightly below 0 °C
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Panthera leo spelaea
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Panthera leo spelaea or P. spelaea, commonly known as the European or Eurasian cave lion, is an extinct subspecies of lion. It is known from fossils and many examples of prehistoric art, P. leo spelaea has been proposed as a separate species Panthera spelaea. One authority considered the cave lion to be closely related to the tiger based on a comparison of skull shapes. Therefore, the cave lion ranged from Europe to Alaska over the Bering land bridge until the late Pleistocene, a recent DNA study indicates that it is a separate species which diverged from a common ancestor shared with the lion 1. It differed from Panthera leo spelaea by its size and from the American lion by its smaller size. In October 2015 two frozen cave lion cubs, estimated to be at least 10,000 years old, were discovered in Yakutia, Siberia in permafrost. Research on the specimens, named Uyan and Dina, indicated the cubs were likely barely a week old at the time of their deaths, further evidence shows the cubs were, like modern lions, hidden at a den site until they were old enough to join the pride. Researchers think that the cubs were trapped and killed by a landslide, and that without air, a second expedition to the site where the cubs were found is planned for 2016, in hopes of finding either the remains of a third cub or possibly the cubs mother. P. leo spelaea evolved from the earlier Panthera leo fossilis, genetic evidence indicates this lineage was isolated from extant lions after its dispersal to Europe. P. l. spelaea lived from 370,000 to 10,000 years ago, apparently, it became extinct about 12,400 14C years ago, as the Würm glaciation receded. The following cladogram shows the relationship between P. spelaea and other pantherines according to Barnett et al. besides Linnaeus, This subspecies was one of the largest lions. The skeleton of a male, which was found in 1985 near Siegsdorf, had a shoulder height of around 1.2 m. This is similar to the size of a large modern lion. A large specimen is estimated to weigh 317-362 kg, the size of this male has been exceeded by other specimens of this subspecies. Therefore, this cat may have been over 10% bigger than modern lions, the cave lion is known from Paleolithic cave paintings, ivory carvings, and clay figurines. Other archaeological artifacts indicate they were featured in Paleolithic religious rituals, in 2008, a well-preserved cave lion specimen was unearthed near the Maly Anyuy River in Chukotka, Russia, which still retained some clumps of hair. Some paintings of them in caves show several hunting together, which suggests the hunting strategy of contemporary lionesses, isotopic analyses of bone collagen samples extracted from fossils suggest reindeer and cave bear cubs were prominent in the diets of northwestern European cave lions. There was a suggestion of a shift in dietary preferences subsequent to the disappearance of the cave hyena, the last cave lions seem to have focused on reindeer, up to the brink of local extinction or extirpation of both species
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Woolly mammoth
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The woolly mammoth is a species of mammoth that lived during the Pleistocene epoch, and was one of the last in a line of mammoth species, beginning with Mammuthus subplanifrons in the early Pliocene. The woolly mammoth diverged from the steppe mammoth about 400,000 years ago in East Asia and its closest extant relative is the Asian elephant. Mammoth remains had long known in Asia before they became known to Europeans in the 17th century. The origin of these remains was long a matter of debate, the mammoth was identified as an extinct species of elephant by Georges Cuvier in 1796. The woolly mammoth was roughly the size as modern African elephants. Males reached shoulder heights between 2.7 and 3.4 m and weighed up to 6 tonnes, females reached 2. 6–2.9 m in shoulder heights and weighed up to 4 tonnes. A newborn calf weighed about 90 kilograms, the woolly mammoth was well adapted to the cold environment during the last ice age. It was covered in fur, with a covering of long guard hairs. The colour of the coat varied from dark to light, the ears and tail were short to minimise frostbite and heat loss. It had long, curved tusks and four molars, which were replaced six times during the lifetime of an individual and its behaviour was similar to that of modern elephants, and it used its tusks and trunk for manipulating objects, fighting, and foraging. The diet of the mammoth was mainly grass and sedges. Individuals could probably reach the age of 60 and its habitat was the mammoth steppe, which stretched across northern Eurasia and North America. The woolly mammoth coexisted with humans, who used its bones and tusks for making art, tools, and dwellings. Isolated populations survived on St. Paul Island until 5,600 years ago, after its extinction, humans continued using its ivory as a raw material, a tradition that continues today. It has been proposed the species could be recreated through cloning, the first woolly mammoth remains studied by European scientists were examined by Hans Sloane in 1728 and consisted of fossilised teeth and tusks from Siberia. Sloane was the first to recognise that the remains belonged to elephants, others interpreted Sloanes conclusion slightly differently, arguing the flood had carried elephants from the Tropics to the Arctic. Sloanes paper was based on descriptions and a few scattered bones collected in Siberia. He discussed the question of whether or not the remains were from elephants, in 1738, Johann Philipp Breyne argued that mammoth fossils represented some kind of elephant
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Oymyakon
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Oymyakon is a rural locality in Oymyakonsky District of the Sakha Republic, Russia, located along the Indigirka River,30 kilometers northwest of Tomtor on the Kolyma Highway. Oymyakon is one of the coldest permanently inhabited locales on Earth and it is named after the Oymyakon River, whose name reportedly comes from the Even word kheium, meaning unfrozen patch of water, place where fish spend the winter. However, another states that the Even word heyum means frozen lake. Oymyakon, population of 500 people, is in eastern Yakutia at approximately 750 meters above sea level, at the villages northerly position, day length varies from three hours in December to twenty-one hours in June. During World War II, an airfield was here for the Alaska-Siberian air route used to ferry American Lend-Lease aircraft to the Eastern Front. With an extreme climate, Oymyakon is known as one of the candidates for the Northern Pole of Cold. The ground there is permanently frozen, on February 6,1933, a temperature of −67.8 °C was recorded at Oymyakons weather station. Only Antarctica has recorded lower official temperatures The weather station is in a valley between Oymyakon and Tomtor, sometimes the temperature drops below 0 °C in late September and may remain below freezing until mid-May. In Oymyakon sometimes the minimum temperature for January, February. Sometimes summer months can also be cold, but June. Oymyakon, Verkhoyansk and Yakutsk are the only three permanently inhabited places in the world that have recorded temperatures below −60.0 °C for every day in January, Oymyakon has never recorded an above freezing temperature between October 25 and March 17. Although winters in Oymyakon are long and excessively cold, summers are mild, sometimes with hot, the warmest month on record is July 2010 with an average temperature of +18.7 °C. In June, July and August temperatures over 30 °C are not rare during the day, on July 28,2010, Oymyakon recorded a record high temperature of 34.6 °C, yielding a temperature range of 102.3 °C. Verkhoyansk and Yakutsk are the other places in the world with a temperature amplitude higher than 100 °C. The climate is dry, but as average monthly temperatures are below freezing for seven months of the year. Summers are much wetter than winters, Oymyakon has been featured in a number of television series, The episode The Winters Tale of the 1996 PBS weather documentary series Savage Skies. The season two episode Siberia of the documentary series Worlds Most Dangerous Roads, middleton describes how Oymyakon lies between two mountain ranges, trapping cold air between throughout the year. In the winter, once every two days, the villages cattles herd bull was harnessed between the shafts of a sledge with a big water tank on it and led to the spring
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Woolly rhinoceros
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The woolly rhinoceros is an extinct species of rhinoceros that was common throughout Europe and northern Asia during the Pleistocene epoch and survived the last glacial period. The genus name Coelodonta means cavity tooth, the woolly rhinoceros was a member of the Pleistocene megafauna. As the last and most derived member of the Pleistocene rhinoceros lineage, stocky limbs and thick woolly pelage made it well suited to the steppe-tundra environment prevalent across the Palearctic ecozone during the Pleistocene glaciations. Like the vast majority of rhinoceroses, the plan of the woolly rhinoceros adhered to a conservative morphology. A study of 40, 000- to 70, 000-year-old DNA samples showed its closest extant relative is the Sumatran rhinoceros, the appearance of woolly rhinos is known from mummified individuals from Siberia as well as cave paintings. An adult woolly rhinoceros was typically around 3 to 3.8 metres in length, with a weight of around 1. The woolly rhinoceros could grow to be 2 m tall, the size was thus comparable to, or slightly larger than. Two horns on the skull were made of keratin, the horn being 61 cm in length, with a smaller horn between its eyes. It had thick, long fur, small ears, short, thick legs, Cave paintings suggest a wide dark band between the front and hind legs, but the feature is not universal, and the identification of pictured rhinoceroses as woolly rhinoceros is uncertain. Its shape was only from prehistoric cave drawings until a completely preserved specimen was discovered in a tar pit in Starunia. The specimen, a female, is now on display in the Polish Academy of Sciences Museum of Natural History in Kraków. Several frozen specimens have also found in Siberia, the latest in 2007. The woolly rhinoceros used its horns for defensive purposes and to attract mates, during Greenland Stadial 2 the North Sea retreated northward, as sea levels were up to 125 metres lower than today. The woolly rhinoceros roamed the exposed Doggerland and much of Northern Europe and was common in the cold, arid desert that is southern England and its geographical range expanded and contracted with the alternating cold and warm cycles, forcing populations to migrate as glaciers receded. The woolly rhinoceros co-existed with woolly mammoths and several other larger mammals of the Pleistocene megafauna. A close relative, Elasmotherium, had a southern range. It is believed they migrated there to northern Asia and Europe when the Ice Age began. Females gave birth to one or two calves, controversy has long surrounded the precise dietary preference of Coelodonta as past investigations have found both grazing and browsing modes of life to be plausible
36.
Kolyma River
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The Kolyma River is a river in northeastern Siberia, whose basin covers parts of the Sakha Republic, Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, and Magadan Oblast of Russia. It begins at the confluence of the Kulu River and the Ayan Yuryakh River and empties into the Kolyma Gulf of the East Siberian Sea, the Kolyma is 2,129 kilometres long. The area of its basin is 644,000 square kilometres, the Kolyma is frozen to depths of several metres for about 250 days each year, becoming free of ice only in early June, until October. In 1640 Dimitry Zyryan went overland to the Indigirka, in 1641 he sailed down the Indigirka, went east and up the Alazeya. Here they heard of the Kolyma and met Chukchis for the first time, in 1643 he returned to the Indigirka, sent his yasak to Yakutsk and went back to the Alazeya. In 1645 he returned to the Lena where he met a party and he returned east and died in early 1646. In the winter of 1641–42 Mikhail Stadukhin, accompanied by Semyon Dezhnyov and he spent the next winter there, built boats and sailed down the Indigirka and east to the Alazeya where he met Zyryan. Zyryan and Dezhnyov stayed at the Alazeya, while Stadukhin went east and they built a zimovye, probably at Srednekolymsk, and returned to Yakutsk in late 1645. In 1892–94 Baron Eduard Von Toll carried out surveys in the basin of the Kolyma on behalf of the Russian Academy of Sciences. During one year and two days the expedition covered 25,000 kilometres, of which 4,200 kilometres were up rivers, the Kolyma is known for its Gulag labour camps and gold mining, both of which have been extensively documented since Joseph Stalin–era Soviet archives opened. The river gives its title to an anthology about life in Gulag camps by Varlam Shalamov. After the camps were closed, state subsidies, local industries, many people have migrated, but those who remain in the area make a living by fishing and hunting. In small fishing settlements, fish are sometimes stored in caves carved from permafrost, the first two Americans to visit the Kolyma after the Nanuks visit were writer Wallace Kaufman and journalist Rebecca Clay, who traveled by cutter from Ziryanka to Green Cape in August 1991. Settlements at the Kolyma river include Sinegorye, Debin, Ust-Srednekan, Seymchan, Zyryanka, Srednekolymsk, there is a hydropower plant at Sinegorye in the upper part of the river. The plant was started in the 1980s by Kolyma Gestroi and both the plant and the town of Sinegoria were built under the supervision of chief engineer Oleg Kogadovski. The town included an olympic sized swimming pool, a rifle range. Kogadovski said that in order to attract and employ good talent in such a remote place, the dam provides most of the electricity to the region including Magadan. The Kolyma dam is a dam some 150 ft high
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Bison
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Bison are large, even-toed ungulates in the genus Bison within the subfamily Bovinae. Two extant and four species are recognized. Of the four species, three were North American endemics, Bison antiquus, B. latifrons, and B. occidentalis. The fourth, B. priscus, ranged across steppe environments from Western Europe, through Central Asia, East Asia including Japan, of the two surviving species, the American bison, B. bison, found only in North America, is the more numerous. Although sometimes referred to historically as a buffalo, it is distantly related to the true buffalo. The North American species is composed of two subspecies, the Plains bison, B. b. bison, and the Wood bison, B. b. athabascae, which is the namesake of Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada. A third subspecies, the Eastern Woodland Bison is no longer considered a valid taxon, references to Woods Bison or Wood Bison from the eastern United States confusingly refer to this subspecies, not B. b. athabascae, which was not found in the region. The European bison B. bonasus, or wisent, is found in Europe, while all bison species are classified in their own genus, they are sometimes bred with domestic cattle and produce fertile offspring called beefalo or zubron. The American bison and the European bison are the largest surviving terrestrial animals in North America, Bison are good swimmers and can cross rivers over half a mile wide. They are nomadic grazers and travel in herds, the bulls leave the herds of females at two or three years of age, and join a male herd, which are generally smaller than female herds. Towards the end of the summer, for the reproductive season, American bison are known for living in the Great Plains, but formerly had a much larger range including much of the eastern United States and parts of Mexico. The American Plains bison is no longer listed as endangered, genetically pure B. b. bison currently number only ~20,000, separated into fragmented herds - all of which require active conservation measures. Although superficially similar, physical and behavioural differences exist between the American and European bison, the American species has 15 ribs, while the European bison has 14. The American bison has four lumbar vertebrae, while the European has five, adult American bison are less slim in build and have shorter legs. American bison tend to more, and browse less than their European relatives. Their anatomies reflect this difference, the American bisons head hangs lower than the Europeans. The body of the American bison is hairier, though its tail has less hair than that of the European bison. American bison are more easily tamed than their European cousins, the bovine tribe split about 5 to 10 million years ago into the buffalos and a group leading to bison and taurine cattle
38.
Horse
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The horse is one of two extant subspecies of Equus ferus. It is an ungulate mammal belonging to the taxonomic family Equidae. The horse has evolved over the past 45 to 55 million years from a small multi-toed creature, Eohippus, into the large, humans began to domesticate horses around 4000 BC, and their domestication is believed to have been widespread by 3000 BC. Horses in the subspecies caballus are domesticated, although some domesticated populations live in the wild as feral horses. There is an extensive, specialized vocabulary used to describe equine-related concepts, covering everything from anatomy to life stages, size, colors, markings, breeds, locomotion, and behavior. Horses anatomy enables them to use of speed to escape predators and they have a well-developed sense of balance. Related to this need to flee from predators in the wild is an unusual trait, female horses, called mares, carry their young for approximately 11 months, and a young horse, called a foal, can stand and run shortly following birth. Most domesticated horses begin training under saddle or in harness between the ages of two and four and they reach full adult development by age five, and have an average lifespan of between 25 and 30 years. There are more than 300 breeds of horse in the world today, horses were historically used in warfare, from which a wide variety of riding and driving techniques developed, using many different styles of equipment and methods of control. Many products are derived from horses, including meat, milk, hide, hair, bone, humans provide domesticated horses with food, water and shelter, as well as attention from specialists such as veterinarians and farriers. Specific terms and specialized language are used to describe equine anatomy, different life stages, colors, depending on breed, management and environment, the modern domestic horse has a life expectancy of 25 to 30 years. Uncommonly, a few animals live into their 40s and, occasionally, the oldest verifiable record was Old Billy, a 19th-century horse that lived to the age of 62. In modern times, Sugar Puff, who had listed in Guinness World Records as the worlds oldest living pony. The exception is in endurance riding, where the age to compete is based on the animals actual calendar age. The following terminology is used to describe horses of various ages, Colt, a common terminology error is to call any young horse a colt, when the term actually only refers to young male horses. Filly, A female horse under the age of four, foal, A horse of either sex less than one year old. A nursing foal is sometimes called a suckling and a foal that has been weaned is called a weanling, most domesticated foals are weaned at five to seven months of age, although foals can be weaned at four months with no adverse physical effects. Gelding, A castrated male horse of any age, mare, A female horse four years old and older
39.
Yukagir
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Its population as of the 2010 Census was 154, of whom 84 were male and 70 female, up from 106 recorded during the 2002 Census. Official website of the Sakha Republic, registry of the Administrative-Territorial Divisions of the Sakha Republic. Закон №173-З №353-III от30 ноября2004 г, «Об установлении границ и о наделении статусом городского и сельского поселений муниципальных образований Республики Саха », в ред. Закона №1058-З №1007-IV от25 апреля2012 г, «О внесении изменений в Закон Республики Саха Об установлении границ и о наделении статусом городского и сельского поселений муниципальных образований Республики Саха ». Вступил в силу со дня официального опубликования, Опубликован, Якутия, №245,31 декабря2004 г
40.
Siberian Traps
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The Siberian Traps form a large region of volcanic rock, known as a large igneous province, in Siberia, Russia. The term traps is derived from the Swedish word for stairs, referring to the hills forming the landscape of the region. Vast volumes of lava covered a large expanse of Siberia in a flood basalt event. Today the area covered is about 2 million square kilometres —roughly equal to western Europe in land area—and estimates of the original coverage are as high as 7 million square kilometres, the original volume of lava is estimated to range from 1 to 4 million cubic kilometres. The area covered lies between latitude 50° and 75° north and longitude 60° to 120° east, another possible cause may be the impact that formed the Wilkes Land crater, which may have been contemporaneous and would have been nearly antipodal to the Traps. This controversial scientific debate is ongoing, the Siberian Traps are considered to have erupted via numerous vents over a period of roughly a million years or more, probably east and south of Norilsk in Siberia. Individual eruptions of basalt lavas could have exceeded 2000 km3, the presence of extensive tuff and pyroclastic deposits suggests that a number of large explosive eruptions occurred during or before the eruptions of basaltic lavas. The presence of volcanic rocks such as rhyolite is also indicative of explosive eruptions. This massive eruptive event spanned the Permian-Triassic boundary, about 250 million years ago, one of the major questions is whether the Siberian Traps were directly responsible, or if they were themselves caused by some other, larger event, such as an asteroid impact. This extinction event, also called the Great Dying, affected all life on Earth, life on land took at least 30 million years to fully recover from the environmental disruptions which may have been caused by the eruption of the Siberian Traps. Calculations of sea temperature from δ18O measurements indicate that at its peak. The tetrapod gap of equatorial Pangea coincides with an end-Permian to Middle Triassic global coal gap that indicates the loss of peat swamps, the giant Norilsk-Talnakh nickel–copper–palladium deposit formed within the magma conduits in the main part of the Siberian Traps. Deccan Traps Emeishan Traps Viluy Traps The Siberian Traps by Richard Cowen The Siberian Traps Large Igneous Province Toxic Gases Caused Worlds Worst Mass Extinction
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Geological history of Earth
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The geological history of Earth follows the major events in Earths past based on the geologic time scale, a system of chronological measurement based on the study of the planets rock layers. Earth was initially due to extreme volcanism and frequent collisions with other bodies. Eventually, the layer of the planet cooled to form a solid crust when water began accumulating in the atmosphere. The Moon formed soon afterwards, possibly as a result of the impact of a planetoid with the Earth, outgassing and volcanic activity produced the primordial atmosphere. Condensing water vapor, augmented by ice delivered from comets, produced the oceans, as the surface continually reshaped itself over hundreds of millions of years, continents formed and broke apart. They migrated across the surface, occasionally combining to form a supercontinent, roughly 750 million years ago, the earliest-known supercontinent Rodinia, began to break apart. The continents later recombined to form Pannotia,600 to 540 million years ago, then finally Pangaea, the present pattern of ice ages began about 40 million years ago, then intensified at the end of the Pliocene. The polar regions have undergone repeated cycles of glaciation and thaw, repeating every 40. The last glacial period of the current ice age ended about 10,000 years ago, the Precambrian includes approximately 90% of geologic time. It extends from 4.6 billion years ago to the beginning of the Cambrian Period and it includes three eons, the Hadean, Archean, and Proterozoic. Major volcanic events altering the Earths environment and causing extinctions may have occurred 10 times in the past 3 billion years. During Hadean time, the Solar System was forming, probably within a cloud of gas and dust around the sun. The Hadean Eon is not formally recognized, but it marks the era before we have adequate record of significant solid rocks. The oldest dated zircons date from about 4,400 million years ago, Earth was initially molten due to extreme volcanism and frequent collisions with other bodies. Eventually, the layer of the planet cooled to form a solid crust when water began accumulating in the atmosphere. The Moon formed soon afterwards, possibly as a result of the impact of a planetoid with the Earth. Some of this objects mass merged with the Earth, significantly altering its composition. Some of the material survived to form an orbiting moon, more recent potassium isotopic studies suggest that the Moon was formed by a smaller, high-energy, high-angular-momentum giant impact cleaving off a significant portion of the Earth
Russia, 
Kazakhstan
listen)) is an extensive geographical region, and by the broadest definition is also known as North Asia. Siberia has historically been a part of modern Russia since the 16th and 17th centuries.
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