Lake Baikal, in southern Siberia, is the world’s oldest lake, estimated to be between 25 and 30 million years old. It is also the world’s largest lake, holding a staggering 22% of the total freshwater in the world.
These are just the start of the remarkable numbers behind Lake Baikal.
The vast majority of the world’s water is found in our oceans. Even when it comes to freshwater, most is located in glaciers and ice caps, with lakes making up only a small portion of it. Most lakes that exist today are quite small and young, formed during the end of the last ice age around 20,000 years old.
This is what makes Lake Baikal so special, with clear evidence dating it back to the 25-30 million-year-old range. Only a handful of other natural lakes are even a million years old, and though a couple of these could potentially be older than Baikal, there is no evidence confirming their existence nearly as far back, and they were likely formed far more recently.
All of these lakes over a million years old are known as ‘Ancient Lakes’. They were caused by tectonic plates rather than ice ages or rivers flowing into them. Ancient Lakes are also much deeper, with depths sometimes bottoming out at over one mile.
No lake has a greater depth than Baikal, measuring 5,387 feet (1,642 meters). This is the lake’s central basin, which is one of three basins within the lake. The depths are made even more dramatic by the extreme altitudes surrounding many of the lake’s shores. It sits in the deepest continental rift on planet Earth, and the rift continues to widen every year.
While the surface area of Baikal is big – 49 miles wide at its widest point – there are six lakes with larger surface areas in the world (if you include the saline Caspian Sea). Four of these are the Great Lakes in North America, with Lake Erie ranking 11th. And yet, if you totaled all the water in the Great Lakes, Baikal would still contain more.
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If you combined all the freshwater in the world, from lakes, rivers, streams, swamps, marshes, animals, organisms and the earth’s atmosphere, you would be able to fill a cube roughly 22 miles (35 km) on each side. Of this, 22%, around 5,600 cubic miles, is found in Baikal.
As well as its size and age, Baikal is also home to over 2,000 unique species found nowhere else on earth. Among these is the Baikal Seal, one of only three freshwater seals in the world.
There are 45 islets and islands within Lake Baikal, the largest of which are Olkhon and Ushkany. The Selenga is one of many rivers that run into the lake, while the only outflow is through the Angara River, a tributary of the Yenisey.
It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, and offers us a fascinating, unparalleled glimpse into the way our lakes, lands and planet both evolved and continue to do so.
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2 Comments
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Thank you for this brilliant story about Lake Baikal . Atage 94 it is good something new every day.