The Caucasus Mountains and Its Nations

The Caucasus Mountains stretch roughly 1,100 kilometers between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, conventionally dividing the Greater Caucasus range in the north from the lower Lesser Caucasus range in the south, and the region is frequently treated as the geographic boundary between Europe and Asia, though the precise line is a matter of convention rather than a hard physical fact. The Greater Caucasus contains the highest peaks in Europe by the commonly used convention that places the continental boundary along its watershed: Mount Elbrus, a dormant volcano in Russia's Kabardino-Balkaria region, reaches 5,642 meters, taller than any peak in the Alps, while Mount Kazbek on the Georgia–Russia border rises to 5,047 meters and features prominently in Georgian folklore, including the myth that Prometheus was chained to its slopes. This is a young, still-rising, and seismically active mountain belt formed by the collision of the Arabian Plate with the Eurasian Plate, and destructive earthquakes, including one that devastated Spitak, Armenia, in December 1988 and killed an estimated 25,000 people, remain a persistent regional hazard.