Caspian Sea and a Pleistocene stage, that includes glaciation cycles and the creation of the present Volga River. During the first stage, the Tethys Sea had evolved into the Sarmatian Lake, that was created from the modern Black Sea and south Caspian, when the collision of the Arabian peninsula with Western Asia pushed up the Kopet Dag and Caucasus Mountains, setting definitive south and west boundaries to the Caspian basin. This orogeneic movement was continuous throughout the years, while Caspian was regularly disconnecting from the Black Sea. In the late Pontian, a mountain arch rose across the south basin and divided it
Pontic–Caspian steppe shore of the Caspian Sea in the Dagestan region of Russia, but the drier Caspian lowland desert lies between the Pontic steppe and the northwestern and northern shores of the Caspian. The Kazakh Steppe bounds the Pontic steppe on the southeast. The Ponto-Caspian seas are the remains of the Turgai Sea, an extension of the Paratethys which extended south and east of the Urals and covering much of today's West Siberian Plain in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Pontic–Caspian steppe The Pontic–Caspian steppe, Pontic steppe or Ukrainian steppe is the vast steppeland stretching from the northern shores of the Black Sea