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Nature – Lake Baikal |
Russia’s embassador Milesku Spefary, who crossed Baikal in the year 1675, wrote “Baikal may be called a sea for the reason, that the Angara river flows out of it and so it mixes its waters with a great sea... and you cannot ride around it for its size in width and length and depth great is...And it may be called a lake for the water in there is fresh, not salty.” Baikal’s resemblance with a sea was pointed at for example by Brithish traveller John Bell: “...the water while rushing over the rocks roars like a sea tide so that people there can’t hear their own voice.” How did this enormous body of cristall-clear fresh water appear? The scientists still argue on that matter. Baikal strikes us with its beauty, reachness of the fauna, with its unique essence. The famous scientist, the USSR Academy of Sciences Associate Member, G.I. Galaziy calculated that out of 2630 species ofplants and animals found in the lake by the present day, 60 % are unique, or endemics. Among them are : golomyanka – the fish, met nowhere else in the world, and also nerpa, omul and deep-water sponge, named Baikalski because of their peculiarity. Their closest relatives are found in the Arctic Ocean and vivdly have sea origin. Among the lower animals endemic are molluscs, Planaria, more than 300 species of Amphipoda and many other organisms. On the banks of Baikal were also found new kinds of plants, that appeared in the last geological epoch.
The climate of the banks has features of a sea: in summer it is cooler here than in a distance from the lake, in winter it is warmer. The enormous amount of water (Baikal contains about 23 thousand cubic kilometers of water) absorbing the heat in summer, cool down the masses of air conterminal to the water. In the autumn an opposite phenomenon is observed: it is warming the air by the waters of the lake. The amount of sunny days here is equal to those at the Black Sea shores of our country, but the climate is severe enough and the average annual temperature doesn’t exceed 3.2° C below zero. Baikal extended 650 km in length, that is why the climate in different parts of the lake varies – the climate of the southern extremity of the lake is two times milder than the one of the northern extremity.
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Among the beauties of our
planet Lake Baikal takes a special place and mostly because it is the greatest enigma,
that the nature presented us with about 25 million years ago, and that we didn’t manage
to solve untill the present days.
The
unique character of the Baikal fauna is so great, that is was separated into a special
zoogeographical subsphere of Golarctic (Golarctic is the whole northern part of Eurasia).
The unique discoveries demonstrated the possibility of forming of rich endemic fauna in
the old and detached lake. B.I. Dibovsky, the professor of the Krakov University, who was
in Siberia in exile for participation in the liberatory revolt in june of the year 1863
and worked at Baikal during the 70-s of the XIX century, called it the
“zoopaleontological museum”.