Buried valleys of the north-west of the East European plain: distribution, morphology, geology and problems of genesis

A lot of buried valleys exist on the territory of the northwestern East European Plain. They are deeply cut in the pre-Quaternary rocks. The buried valleys genesis is a long-standing question of the Quaternary geology of the northwestern Russia. By now, geological data have been accumulated to solve this problem. The geological structure of the buried valleys was detailed on the basis of unpublished reports and published materials on geology of buried valleys of Saint-Petersburg, Leningrad, Pskov, Novgorod and Kaliningrad regions as well as adjacent regions of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus. Most of the data do not exclusively testify to river-erosion genesis of the valleys. Modern data also suggest that some of the buried valleys of the northwestern Russia are tunnel valleys and were formed by subglacial meltwater erosion as well as buried valleys of neighboring regions.