Lake Baikal, facts, depth and how to get there

At the end of March, the ice on Lake Baikal can support a truck, while itself being so transparent that a person standing on it can see downward-leading cracks and methane bubbles frozen into pillars. Beneath one's feet there may be six hundred, eight hundred, a thousand meters of water, and it is almost impossible for the mind to comprehend this because the eye shows a solid floor.

This feeling does not deceive. To the bottom at its deepest point is one thousand six hundred forty-two meters, and three Ostankino towers placed one on top of the other would go completely underwater. No other lake on the planet approaches such marks, hence the English-language query «deepest lake in the world,» for which the search engine yields Baikal as the very first result. Its other records are gathered in the table below, and there are enough of them to make a whole list.

A twenty-five-million-year-old crack in the Earth's crust

By all the rules, this lake should not exist. A body of water fed by rivers is doomed to silt up and turn into a swamp over a span of tens of millennia, yet Lake Baikal is numbered in tens of millions of years, and it is older than many mountain systems. The reason for such longevity lies far beneath the water.

The lake occupies the floor of a rift, a massive fault where the Earth's crust is slowly pulling apart. The process is happening right now; the shores are spreading by about two centimeters a year, the bottom is sinking, earthquakes occur in this area constantly, and that is precisely why the basin does not fill with sediment, but only becomes deeper. The sediment layer at the bottom reaches several kilometers, and beneath it lies a buried basin much more ancient than the current one.

The fifth part of the planet's unfrozen freshwater

The sheer volume is more impressive than the depth, and it becomes easiest to grasp through a simple assumption. If the basin were to empty all at once, it would take all the rivers on the planet combined nearly a year to fill it back up. The lake holds roughly a fifth of all liquid fresh water on the Earth's surface, and from the shore this figure is impossible to comprehend because the opposite shore simply cannot be seen.

More than three hundred rivers and streams bring water to it, while the only outlet is the Angara, about which locals tell a legend of a daughter who fled from her stern father to the Yenisei. At the same time, the water remains so transparent that in spring a white disk is visible at a depth of up to forty meters. This purity is maintained by a tiny epischura crustacean just over a millimeter long, which passes the entire water column through itself, filtering out bacteria and algae.

Who lives here and nowhere else in the world

Prolonged isolation did to local life what islands do. More than half of the local inhabitants are not found anywhere outside the lake, and in terms of the density of endemic species, no freshwater body in the world compares to Baikal. The main celebrity here is ringed seal, the only seal species that lives exclusively in fresh water. Its closest relatives swim in arctic seas thousands of kilometers away, and scientists have been debating for two centuries how the seal's ancestors reached the Siberian basin.

Equally surprising is the golomyanka, a translucent, live-bearing fish without scales, whose body consists of one-third fat, and through which, when placed on paper, text can be read. It lives at depths of up to one and a half kilometers and forms the basis of the diet of that very nerpa seal. A separate local pride is the omul, a whitefish species that is smoked right at the piers and sold hot. It was fished for decades to the point where commercial fishing had to be closed, and today's market omul most often comes from afar or is grown in a farm.

We have a separate article about another Siberian endemic living nearby in the Far Eastern taiga, Amur tiger.

Ice that cars drive on

Lake Baikal freezes completely, usually in January, and stays under ice until May, with its thickness reaching a meter or more by the end of winter. Official winter roads are laid across this ice, including to Olkhon Island, and a truck carrying groceries for local stores travels across it as if it were a highway.

Winter Baikal has become a distinct tourist phenomenon precisely because of its transparency. The ice freezes slowly and in strong winds, so it turns out almost without air bubbles, and through it you can see the bottom in shallow water and the darkness plunging downwards in the depths. Add to this the hummocks, blocks of ice as tall as a person, grottoes with hanging icicles on the coastal cliffs, and the sound of a crack running through the ice, audible for kilometers.

The winds here have their own names and character. Sarma, bursting out of the mountain gorge, accelerates up to forty meters per second and has capsized vessels; Barguzin blows along the lake and is famous from the song; Kultuk comes from the south and brings bad weather. The weather changes within an hour, and anyone heading onto the ice or into a boat should remember this.

How to get to Lake Baikal

The standard route begins in Irkutsk, where a flight from Moscow takes about six hours. From there, it is about seventy kilometers and a one-hour drive to the settlement of Listvyanka on the very shore, where the Baikal Museum with aquariums and live nerpa seals operates, and it is usually visited by those who have only one day for the lake.

The second route leads to Olkhon, the largest island in the lake, which is a five- or six-hour journey from Irkutsk, involving a ferry crossing in the summer and an ice road in the winter. Olkhon is home to Shamanka Rock, one of the main shrines of Buryat shamanism and the most recognizable image in any search for «Lake Baikal.».

The train remains a unique way to travel and a distinct experience because the Trans-Siberian Railway runs along the southern shore, and from Slyudyanka to Baikalsk, passengers look out at the lake directly from the window for several hours. The historical part of this railway, the Circum-Baikal Railway with its dozens of tunnels and stone galleries, now operates as a weekend tourist route. From the eastern side, Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, reaches the lake, from where one can get to the Barguzin Bay and further to the neighboring Chivyrkuy Bay, where Zmeinaya Bay with its hot springs is located.

When to go and what to prepare for

There are two seasons at Lake Baikal, and they are structured completely differently. Summer, from July to early September, offers warm air, hiking trails along the Great Baikal Trail, and the opportunity to swim, although the water warms up only in shallow bays, while in the open lake it stays around ten degrees even in August. The winter season begins in February and ends in the first half of April, when the ice is still strong and the sun already provides light for photography.

It is also worth knowing about the more prosaic matters. Midges and ticks are common in the taiga around the lake in summer, and vaccinations against tick-borne encephalitis must be done in advance. The ecology deserves a separate discussion. For half a century, a pulp and mill plant smoked on the shore, which was only closed in the last decade; along the coastline, the alga Spirogyra, which is alien to the lake, blooms in places; and debates over how many tourists the lake can withstand are ongoing. When searching for «Baikal Russia,» English-language guidebooks write about all of this directly, and the status of a UNESCO World Heritage site works here not as a medal, but as a list of obligations.

Home

The fault beneath the lake has neither healed nor grown quiet; it is active right now, which is why the water here sits at a level found nowhere else on Earth. From this same source springs everything else: an age that numbers in the millions of years, a clarity that allows one in the spring to make out a white disc descending into the depths, and a life consisting half of creatures not found outside the basin.

What matters more to the traveler is something else. There are actually two Baikals, and you have to choose between them in advance. The summer one offers trails along the shore, ferries, warm weather, and cold water; the winter one offers transparent ice, ice roads, and temperatures approaching thirty below; and in between lie months when going there makes no sense. In both cases, the journey begins in Irkutsk or Ulan-Ude, after which distances are measured in hours along the highway or across the ice.

Russian for travelers

Lake Baikal remains a place where English is of little help: the ferry schedule, a conversation with a guesthouse owner, an ice crossing announcement—all of this is in Russian. At Palme School, children from four to seventeen years old study Russian online in small groups, and there are separate conversational practice groups for adults, where they analyze real-life situations like asking for directions or talking at the market. You can see how it works at two free lessons, the first of which is an introduction with a methodologist who selects a group based on age and level, and the second is a trial lesson with a teacher and other students.