Thanks mudra, cool pictures! Lake Baikal has a lot of weird things about it.
Just another interesting bit of info.
At 1,637 meters (5,370 ft), Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world, and the
largest freshwater lake in the world by volume.
Lake Baikal was formed in an ancient
rift valley and therefore, is long and crescent-shaped with a surface area (31,494 km2/12,160 sq mi), less than that of
Lake Superior or
Lake Victoria. Baikal is home to more than 1,700 species of plants and animals, two thirds of which can be found nowhere else in the world and was declared a
UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.At more than 25 million years old, it is the oldest lake in the world.
A Russian mini-submarine attempting to set a record for the deepest freshwater dive on July 29, 2008, was originally reported as being successful, but a correction later emerged that reported the MIR I failed to do so, reaching a depth of only 1,580 meters.
Lake Baikal has more water than all of
North America's
Great Lakes combined — 23,600 cubic kilometers (5,700 cu mi), about one fifth of the total surface fresh water on the earth. However, in surface area, it is exceeded by the much shallower Great Lakes,
Superior,
Huron and
Michigan, in
North America, as well as by the relatively shallow
Lake Victoria in
East Africa.Known as the "
Galápagos of Russia", its age and isolation have produced some of the world's richest and most unusual freshwater
fauna, which is of exceptional value to
evolutionary science.
Lake Baikal is in a
rift valley, created by the
Baikal Rift Zone, where the crust of the earth is pulling apart.
The bottom of the lake is 1,371 meters (4,500 ft) below sea level, but below this lies some 7 kilometers (4.3 mi) of
sediment, placing the rift floor some 8–9 kilometers (more than 5 miles) below the surface: the deepest continental
rift on
Earth. In geological terms, the rift is young and active—it widens about two centimeters per year. The fault zone is also seismically active; there are hot springs in the area and notable earthquakes every few years. It drains into the
Angara tributary of the
Yenisei.
Its age is estimated at 25–30 million years, making it one of the most ancient lakes in
geological history. It is unique among large, high-latitude lakes, in that its
sediments have not been scoured by overriding continental ice sheets. U.S. and Russian studies of core sediment in the 1990s provide a detailed record of climatic variation over the past 250,000 years. Longer and deeper sediment cores are expected in the near future. Lake Baikal is furthermore the only confined fresh water lake in which direct and indirect evidence of
gas hydrates exists.
Lake Baikal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal
31,494 square kilometers= surface area
23,600 cubic kilometers= volume
636 kilometers= length
79 kilometers= width
1,637 meters=depth
20 million years
(in present state: 2-3 million years)= age