50 Fun Facts About Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal is in which country?

It lies in southern Siberia between Irkutsk Oblast and the Republic of Buryatia.

What is Lake Baikal's maximum depth?

That makes it the deepest lake in the world; the surface sits 455 metres above sea level, so the bottom is nearly 1,200 metres below it.

Roughly what share of the world's unfrozen fresh water does Lake Baikal hold?

By volume it contains more water than all the North American Great Lakes combined.

How old is Lake Baikal estimated to be?

That makes it the most ancient lake in geological history, and its sediments were never scoured by ice sheets.

Lake Baikal's surface area is slightly larger than which European country?

At 31,722 square kilometres it is the seventh-largest lake in the world by area.

Lake Baikal sits in what kind of geological feature?

The Earth's crust is slowly pulling apart there, and the rift widens by about 4 mm a year.

By roughly how much does the Baikal rift widen each year?

The fault zone is seismically active, with hot springs and notable earthquakes every few years.

How thick is the layer of sediment beneath the bottom of Lake Baikal?

That puts the rift floor 8–11 km below the surface, the deepest continental rift on Earth.

Into how many basins is Lake Baikal divided?

North, Central and South, separated by features such as Academician Ridge and the Selenga delta.

Lake Baikal drains through a single outlet. Which river?

The Angara flows on to join the Yenisey; the Irkutsk Dam on it raised the lake level by 1.4 metres from 1956.

Roughly how many rivers flow into Lake Baikal?

The largest, the Selenga, rises in Mongolia and supplies almost half the inflow.

Which river, rising in Mongolia, provides almost half of Lake Baikal's inflow?

It carries around 935 cubic metres of water per second into the lake.

How far down can you see in Lake Baikal's open water in winter?

In summer, transparency drops to a more ordinary 5–8 metres.

For roughly how long each year is Lake Baikal's surface frozen?

Ice usually reaches 0.5 to 1.4 metres thick, and more than 2 metres where hummocks form.

What is the name of Lake Baikal's largest island?

It is 72 km long and the third-largest lake-bound island in the world; the lake has 27 islands in all.

What is the famous landmark near Khuzhir on the lake's largest island, said to house the deity Burkhan?

Buryat shamanism reveres the 'thirteen lords of Olkhon', and the island is a centre of the ancient Kurumchinskay culture.

The strait between the largest island and the western shore is called Maloye More, meaning what?

Russians long called Baikal a sea rather than a lake, a usage found in Avvakum's autobiography and Remezov's 17th-century maps.

The only legal ice road across Lake Baikal runs to the largest island. How long is it?

It runs from Kurkut on the mainland with ice about 60 cm thick and a 10-tonne weight limit.

What is the local name of the Baikal seal, the only seal endemic to the lake?

It is one of the smallest true seals and one of very few pinnipeds living exclusively in fresh water.

The Baikal nerpa is most closely related to which Arctic species?

So is the Caspian seal, which lives in the other great inland sea of Eurasia.

How long can a Baikal seal stay underwater if it needs to?

It has two litres more blood than any other seal of its size, though most dives last only two to four minutes.

What colour is a Baikal seal pup's natal coat?

The silky white fur is quickly shed for a darker adult-style coat.

Which translucent, scaleless fish is the main food of the Baikal seal?

Also called the Baikal oilfish, it gives birth to live larvae and ranges through the whole water column down to 1.6 km.

How do female golomyankas reproduce?

A female releases a swarm of 2,000–3,000 larvae; only about 17–32% of the population is male.

Which endemic whitefish, smoked and sold in lakeside markets, is Baikal's main commercial fish?

It descends from Arctic whitefish that entered the lake about 20,000 years ago; a fishing ban was imposed in 2017.

Which crustacean group has 350-plus endemic species in Lake Baikal, some growing 'giant'?

Their gigantism, like that of Antarctic amphipods, has been linked to the lake's high dissolved oxygen.

What share of the benthic animal biomass in Lake Baikal is made up of sponges?

Most belong to the endemic family Lubomirskiidae, which colonised the lake about 3.4 million years ago.

Which Siberian tribe of the sixth century gave the lake a name translating as 'much water'?

Han Chinese armies had earlier called it the 'North Sea' of the semi-mythical Four Seas.

Which Russian explorer became the first European to see Lake Baikal, in 1643?

He reached it by going up the Lena; half his party wintered on the Barguzin River.

Which indigenous people raise goats, camels and horses on Lake Baikal's eastern shore?

They called it Baygal nuur, 'natural lake'; the Yakuts called it Bay göl, 'rich lake'.

Before the railway round the lake was finished, what carried Trans-Siberian railcars across Baikal?

It ran from Port Baikal to Mysovaya; the Trans-Siberian itself was built between 1896 and 1902.

How many tunnels did the scenic railway around the south-western shore of the lake originally require?

Along with about 200 bridges; the line was called 'the golden buckle on the steel belt of Russia'.

What happened at Baikal during the Great Siberian Ice March of 1920?

The wind on the open ice was so cold that many froze in place until the spring thaw.

Which foreign military force fought a minor engagement with the Red Army at Lake Baikal in 1918?

The legion was fighting its way east along the Trans-Siberian toward Vladivostok.

The Baykalsk Pulp and Paper Mill, built on the shoreline in 1966, finally went bankrupt in which year?

Soviet scientists had protested from the start; its lignin sludge reservoirs remain a hazard.

What was the Baykalsk mill accused of discharging into the lake?

Vladimir Putin, after viewing the lake from a mini-submarine, declared it in good condition and re-legalised the plant in 2010.

Which two submersibles took Russian scientists to the bottom of Lake Baikal in July 2008?

They reached 1,580 metres, short of Anatoly Sagalevich's 1990 record of 1,637 metres in the same lake.

What kind of scientific instrument has operated beneath Lake Baikal since the 1990s?

The NT-200 array sits 1.1 km deep and 3.6 km from shore; it is being expanded into the Gigaton Volume Detector.

The underwater instrument at Baikal, begun in 1990, was expanded from 2015 into what?

Work on the Baikal-GVD began in 2015; the original detector was started in 1990.

In what year did UNESCO declare Lake Baikal a World Heritage Site?

The Russian government added special economic zone status for the region in 2007.

Which Mongolian body of water is called Baikal's 'sister'?

Baikal is nicknamed the 'older sister' of the pair.

What nickname for Lake Baikal draws tourists and investors?

Foreign visitors to Irkutsk and the lake nearly doubled between 2013 and 2014, to almost 147,000.

Remains of the 'Mal'ta Boy', found 160 km from the lake, show habitation roughly how long ago?

He belonged to the Mal'ta–Buret' culture, and his genome has been important for tracing the ancestry of Native Americans.

Hydrothermal vents found on the floor of Lake Baikal release water at about what temperature?

They have little effect on the lake overall because of its enormous volume; deep water stays at 3.1–3.4 °C year-round.

Which is the only lake in Eurasia larger than Baikal by surface area?

Baikal ranks seventh in the world by surface area but first by volume of fresh water.

What name is given to the region lying east of Lake Baikal?

The loosely defined area around the lake itself is sometimes called Baikalia.

The Angara, Baikal's outlet, is a tributary of which great Siberian river?

The lake's water eventually reaches the Kara Sea in the Arctic Ocean.

How many islands does Lake Baikal contain?

The largest, Olkhon, is 72 km long and the third-largest lake-bound island in the world.

Which Chinese-owned company's 2019 bottling plant at Kultuk sparked local protests?

The plan was to export 190 million litres of water to China while lake levels were historically low.

Aboard which type of submersible did Anatoly Sagalevich set the freshwater dive record in 1990?

His 1,637 m mark still stood after the 2008 Mir dives fell short at 1,580 m.