UNIVERSITATEA DIN BUCUREŞTI

Facultatea de Geografie
Specializarea: Geografie

- Proiect la disciplina limba Engleza -

Student:
Ilie Paul-Alexandru
Grupa 102
 Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake in the world (by volume) and the world's deepest lake.
Somewhat crescent shaped, it is in the southern Siberia area of Russia. In 1996 it was declared a
UNESCO World Heritage Site.
"Lake Baikal is the oldest lake in the world. It is home to approximately 1,700 to 1,800 endemic
plant and animal species," said Jennifer Castner of Pacific Environment's Russia program.
Additionally, it holds 20 percent of the world's fresh water, due to the lake's depth.
Lake Baikal is located in southern Siberia (Russia). It is a freshwater lake (represents the largest
freshwater reserve in the world 23000 km³) and is the deepest lake in the world (1637 m).
Although difficult to imagine, the lake depression in Southern Siberia, with a slightly larger
surface area than Belgium, contains 22-23% of the world's drinking water reserves (excluding
glaciers). Lake Baikal, in
addition to being the deepest
lake in the world, can be
considered the oldest in its 20-
25 million years of existence
(excluding the Caspian Sea
and Lake Aral) and one of the
"living museums", in which
about 800 species of animals
and 245 species of endemic
plants, his own, live.

Lake Baikal features

There are 27 mostly uninhabited islands in Lake Baikal, according to Lake Baikal.org. The
largest is 45-mile-long (72 km) Olkhon, on which there are villages. About 1,500 people live
there.
Lake Baikal is considered one of the clearest lakes in the world, according to CNN Traveler.
During the summer, when the lake is full of melted ice from the Siberian mountains, it is
sometimes possible to see more than 130 feet (39 m) down. The stunning clarity is the result of
the melted ice's purity, plankton that eat floating debris and a lack of mineral salts in the lake.
Lake Baikal may be warmer than other parts of Siberia, but in the winter it still gets very cold.
The average air temperature in winter is minus 6 F (minus 21 C). Despite its size, Lake Baikal
freezes over in the winter and usually melts in May or June, according to LakeBaikal.org. The
ice can be up to 6 feet (2 m) thick. In the
summer, the average air temperature is 52 F (11
C). The water temperature in August is around
50 F (10 C). 

Lake Baikal history

At least 25 million years old, Lake Baikal is the oldest lake
in the world. It and the surrounding mountains were formed
by the Earth's crust fracturing and moving. According to
Baikal World Web, it was probably originally a riverbed,
but tremors and fractures in the Earth's crust increased the
size and widened the space between the shores. Parts of the
Baikal basin developed at different times throughout the
Tertiary Period (66 million to 2.6 million years ago).
Melting glaciers also increased the water levels.
It is likely that a series of lakes, similar to the Great Lakes,
developed first and then united in the Pliocene Epoch (5.3 to
2.58 million years ago), according to Baikal World Web.
There are several theories about what could have caused the
unification, including sinking earth, falling rocks, erosion
and earthquakes. Likely, it was a combination of all factors.
Indigenous communities have lived around Lake Baikal
since at least the sixth century B.C., though they visited long
before that. It was the site of a battle in the Han-Xiongu War
(133 B.C. to A.D. 89). Local legend holds that Jesus visited
Lake Baikal, according to Smithsonian magazine. The first
European to visit Lake Baikal was the Russian Kurbat
Ivanov in 1643. Russia expanded its territory to include
Lake Baikal during the 17th-century Russian conquest of Siberia
Lake Baikal ecosystem
About 80 percent of the more than 3,700 species found at Lake Baikal are endemic, meaning
they are found nowhere else on Earth. Probably the most famous of these species is the nerpa,
the world's only exclusively freshwater seal. Scientists are unsure how the nerpa came to Lake
Baikal and evolved, but they suspect the seals might have swum down a prehistoric river from
the Arctic, according to LakeBaikal.org. Other endemic species include the oily, scaleless
golomyanka fish and the omul, a white fish that is one of Lake Baikal's most famous dishes.
Other land-based species around Lake Baikal include bears, reindeer, elk, wild boar, Siberian roe
deer, polecats, ermine, sable and wolves.
More than 50 species of fish live in Lake Baikal, according to Baikal World Web. Aquatic
invertebrate species include more than 100 species of flat worms, more than 700 species of
anthropods (insects, arachnids and crustaceans) and more than 170 species of mollusks. These
invertebrates all help purify the water.
Plant and animal life in the lake is rich and various. There are between 1,500 and 1,800 animal
species at different depths, and hundreds of plant species live on or near the surface. The
majority of the species are endemic to Baikal. There are some 50 species of fish, belonging to
seven families; the most numerous of these are the 25 species of gobies. The omul salmon is
heavily fished; also important are the grayling, lake whitefish, and sturgeon. Unique to the lake is
a fish called the golomyanka, of the family Comephoridae, which gives birth to live young. The
one mammal species is the Baikal seal, or nerpa (Phoca sibirica). There are more than 320 bird
species in the Baikal area.

Threats to Lake Baikal

As Russia and Mongolia have become increasingly industrialized and tourism has increased,
Lake Baikal has faced more and more threats to its environment. Additionally, climate change is
threatening its ecosystem. Water temperatures and ice cover have already changed, according to
BioScience.
Castner described several of the dangers facing Lake Baikal. The biggest threat is probably the
"huge problem with algae on the lake and government failure to develop an adequate response to
it," she said. Massive green algae blooms plague bodies of water like the Great Lakes, but for a
long time Russian scientists assumed that Lake Baikal was too big to be affected by them. But
since at least 2008, Spirogyra algae blooms have appeared on the bottom of the lake, according
to National Geographic. The algae blooms are found in shallow water and wash up on shore,
where they emit a horrible stench.
She added, "There's a huge increase in tourism on shores all around the lake and there's not a real
understanding of how that's affecting the lake." Local communities do not have adequate waste
management systems relative to the number of tourists. But at least one effort to healthily
manage tourists at Lake Baikal is succeeding: the Lake Baikal Trail, which will surround the
entire lake, is being built slowly but surely.
From 1966 to 2008, the Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mill operated off the shores of Lake Baikal.
"Paper-making and pulp-processing are water-intensive processes that involve using water and
then dumping it," Castner explained. The dirty water was dumped into the lake, which resulted in
a 12-square mile environmentally dead zone in the shallows. Community-led opposition led to
valid studies of the problem and, though the government repeatedly delayed it, the mill was
eventually shut down. Today, the
environment in the water is slowly
recovering. But the plant has not been
demolished, the land around it has not been
restored, and the chemicals around it have
not been removed. The town is struggling
economically.

The lake hollow is not symmetrical, having steep slopes on the western shores and gentler slopes
on the eastern. The meandering shoreline runs for some 1,300 miles (2,100 km), with large
indentations at the bays of Barguzin, Chivyrkuysky, and Proval and at Ayaya and Frolikha inlets;
the Svyatoy Nos Peninsula juts out into the lake from the eastern shore. Baikal contains some 45
islets and islands, the largest of which are Olkhon (about 270 square miles [700 square km]) and
Bolshoy (Great) Ushkany (3.6 square miles [9.4 square km]). The influx of water into the lake is
primarily from rivers, chiefly the Selenga. The only outflow is through the Angara River, a
tributary of the Yenisey.
Industries along the shores of Baikal include mining (mica and marble), the manufacture of
cellulose and paper, shipbuilding, fisheries, and timber. There are many mineral springs, and
visitors come to Goryachinsk for the curative properties of the waters. A pulp and paper mill
built on Lake Baikal’s southern shore in 1966 drew strong environmental protests from Soviet
scientists and writers because its wastes were polluting the water, and in 1971 the Soviet
government adopted a decree to protect the lake from polluting emissions. Further pollution
controls were resisted, however, and industrial waste at the site remained a concern in the late
1990s.
The Limnological Institute of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences is
located in the town of Listvyanka, as is the Baikal Sanatorium, and the hydrobiological station of
Irkutsk State University is in Bolshiye Koty (Bolshoy Koti). The protection of natural resources
in the area began with the establishment of the Barguzinsky Nature Reserve in 1916;
subsequently there were added the Baikalsky (1969) and Baikalo-Lenskiy (1986) nature reserves,
the Frolikhinskiy (1976) and Kabansky (1974) wildlife reserves, and the Zabaikalsky and
Pribaikalsky national parks (both 1986). The Lake Baikal Coastal Protection Zone, covering the
lake and its environs (a total of 34,000 square miles [88,000 square km]), was created in 1987,
and the same area was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996.