Bengal Basin, Sediment Sink
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BAIKAL, LAKE Laurent Touchart Department of Geography, UMR 6042 CNRS, University of Limoges, Limoges, France
Introduction Lake Baikal contains one fifth of the freshwater resources of the world, i.e., according to the recent unpublished studies of Alekseev et al. (2002), 23,615 km3. This Russian lake, the deepest in the world (1,637 m), is located in southeastern Siberia. It is 636 km long, from 51° 27′N to 55° 46′N, and covers an area of 31,722 km². Lake Baikal, which appeared 25 million years ago, is the oldest lake on Earth. Owing to its large size and great age, speciation was responsible for a very rich endemism which is very vulnerable to pollution. One of the most famous lakes in the history of limnology Russians conquered the region of Lake Baikal in the seventeenth century. Some learned travellers, such as ambassador Spafari, and exiles, such as the protopope Avvakum, described the lake. In the eighteenth century, soldiers and sailors, such as Bering, needed a map, since a navy was created on Lake Baikal. During the naturalist expedition of Pallas and Georgi in 1775, Pushkarev surveyed the topography of the lake and its surroundings for the first time. Lake Baikal entered the scientific world in the 1860s, when numerous Polish revolutionaries were deported to the region of Irkutsk. Some of them were scientists and studied the lake. Dybowsky, a specialist in gammarids, was the first Baikalian biologist and Chersky was the first geologist. The construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which reached Irkutsk in 1898, favoured human migrations and increased the need for scientific
studies for the safety of the ferries crossing the lake. The Trans-Siberian Railway had its own scientific journal, in which Obruchev, named “the father of Siberian geology,” wrote many articles about the faults of the region and the origin of Lake Baikal. After many expeditions from 1896 to 1902 and 274,369 soundings, Drizhenko produced the first bathymetric map of the lake. In 1916, the Russian Academy of Sciences created the Commission for the Study of Lake Baikal, and, after the Revolution, in 1918, the new government founded the Biological Station of Bolshie Koty on the shore of the lake, and later, in 1928, the Limnological Station of Lake Baikal in Listvyanka. Vereshchagin, one of the world’s most famous limnologists (Martinson, 1995), managed this station until 1942. Some well-known biologists of the postwar period, such as Kozhov, began their studies under the direction of Vereshchagin. After the war, the Baikalian Limnological Institute became one of the biggest in the world. Equipment was plentiful, for example laboratory ships. The Institute of Oceanology in Moscow regularly provided its submarine for the study of Lake Baikal. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been financial difficulties, but new collaborations have also emerged, particularly with American and Japanese researchers.
A very old rift lake The Baikal tectonic valley is the central part of a complex rift zone located in Central Asia from t
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