Lake Baikal

A satellite above Lake Baikal (image courtesy of Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA)

Lake Baikal in Siberia has a surface area of 12,248 sq miles (approximately equal to Belgium).  For a better comparison, Lake Superior has a surface area of 31,700 square miles. However that comparison is in no way apt.  Lake Baikal is prodigiously deep.  It lies on one of the world’s great rift valleys. To its west lies the Eurasian plate and to its east is the Amur plate.  The two plates are springing away from each other at 4 millimeters per year.  In the void between lies Lake Baikal, which is an astonishing 5,380 feet deep.  The 5,700 cubic miles of water contained by the lake compromises twenty percent of the world’s fresh water (not counting ice or water vapor).  It could easily hold all of the water from all of the Great Lakes.  Not only is the lake deep, it is ancient.  Lake Baikal is more than twenty-five million years old, and may be one of the world’s oldest lakes.

Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal contains thousands of species of plants and animals, most of which live no where else on earth.  There is a freshwater seal, the nerpa, which lives on golomyanka, a translucent abyssal fish famous for decomposing almost instantly to fat and bones when exposed to the sun.  There are omuls, lovely small salmonids, caught and smoked by humans around the lake, and there are huge Baikal sturgeons.  The lake is ringed by forested mountains which host brown bear, lynx, wolves, foxes, and wolverines (and maybe the occasional Siberian tiger). These predators live on mountain goats, reindeer, white tailed deer, elk, moose, musk deer, Siberian roe, and wild boar.  The small mammals and birds are too numerous to name.

Golomyanka--An abyssal fresh water fish

The lake’s true oddities are invertebrates which live in the depths. Far beneath the surface, forests of Lubomirskia sponges attain towering heights as they branch into strange shapes.  Benthic and pelagic infusoria are endemic, as are huge predatory swimming flatworms which are covered with suckers.  Shrimp and crustaceans abound.  It has been estimated that the biomass of crustaceans in the lake exceeds 1,800,000 tons. Turbellarian worms, snails and amphipods are also diverse.

An amphipod regards a diver from a sponge forest in Lake Baikal

The Lake is the alleged site of one of the world’s greatest haunted treasures.  Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak, was a tsarist hero who won the golden saber for valor at the battle of Port Arthur.  After the Tsar and his family were executed by Bolsheviks, Kolchak assumed command of the imperial armies during the disastrous civil war.  A substantial detachment of his troops rescued the Empire’s gold reserves (an estimated 1600 tons of gold) and were carrying them across Siberia during the brutal winter of 1919/1920 when temperatures dropped below -60 °F.  Legend has it that both the gold and the troops found their way into Lake Baikal and have never emerged.