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But the common parentage of the Mediterranean and the seas around Japan is still
evident in the great resemblance of the fishes found in this widely separated waters: by
contrast, the Mediterranean and the Red sea, separated by only
a hundred miles or so of
land, have quite different fishes, and it wasn’t until the Suez Canal was cut in 1869 that
they began to mix.
The second and more northern sea, the Uralian ran north from the Tethys to what is
now the Arctic Ocean and it separated the Siberian from the Scandinavian shields. About
240
million years ago, what were to be the Ural mountains began to emerge. There was a
general rising of land which lifted the level of the continent – to be above the waves,
giving Eurasia its shape. The Ural Sea disappeared – but only for a while. Succeeding
upheavals and subsidences of the continental crust created new
seas separating east from
west more than once before the continent was again reunited. Thus Eurasia, as we know it
today has existed only for about 25 million years.
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