A Journey to Lake Baikal

Lauren, Publicity Assistant

On August 1st, Vladimir Putin dove to the depths of the mysterious Lake Baikal, remarking, “I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life…What I saw impressed me because with my own eyes I could see how Baikal is, in all its grandeur, in all its greatness.” And just this week, members of Expedition Baikal performed the deepest submersion into the lake yet, descending 1640m near Cape Izhimei.

Located in south-east Siberia, the Lake Baikal is the oldest (25 million years) and deepest lake in the world, containing 20% of the world’s total unfrozen freshwater reserve. Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal is the story of a trip made halfway around the world by train, cargo ship, and rubber raft by Peter S. Thomson (founding editor and former producer of NPR’s “Living on Earth“) and his brother. Together, discover that despite Baikal’s isolation and mythical ability to protect itself, this perfect piece of nature could yet succumb to human carelessness.

In the excerpt below, Thomson imagines just what a dive to the bottom of Lake Baikal would be like.

As you drift downward, the water occasionally sparkles and flashes as a glint of sunlight catches a copepod or a fish. Baikal’s exceptional clarity allows abundant light to penetrate as far as forty meters, or more than 130 feet, depending on the time of year. By fifty meters down, the light has thinned considerably—only about five percent of the sun’s energy can penetrate this deep. But these are the most energetic of the sun’s visible rays, the ones that plants need to photosynthesize. So even here, algae can live, and life-sustaining oxygen is being produced. You’re in the deep-water lake, what some scientists call the “true” Baikal.

The temperature changes as you descend, as well. You’re taking your dive in the summer, so the temperature falls from the sun-warmed surface layers until you reach somewhere between 250 and 300 meters. If it were winter, the temperature below the frozen surface would rise until you reach about the same depth. The rest of the way down, regardless of the season, the water hovers around 3.9 degrees Celsius.

At 450 meters, parts of the lake bottom are covered with an eerie lattice of sinuous white fibers—a web of bacteria, perhaps sustained by methane seeping from below the lakeshore.

The light fades still further as you descend, the deepening water a giant dimmer switch on the sun. At 500 meters, the lake seems as black as crude oil, but even here a Soviet spacecraft orbiting above the lake was able to discern a few last vestiges of light, deeper than in nearly every other lake in the world. Other experiments with photographic plates have captured a rogue photon or two even deeper still—at 1,500 meters, almost at the bottom of the abyss. The place you’re now approaching.

Nearing the lake’s floor, you pass through a pocket of warmer water. The bottom of Baikal is rent with cracks and fissures, some of which spew superheated water from the earth’s crust, the same stuff that blasts out of Yellowstone’s geysers and seeps out in hot springs all over the planet. Researchers have only recently discovered these thermal vents and believe the conditions around them, including the presence of thermophilic bacteria, are similar to those along the spreading zones of the oceans—another reason some think that Baikal is really more an infant ocean than a lake.

Finally, you settle onto the bottom, startled, for a moment, by the feel of something solid beneath you. Solid, but soft—the muck of the millennia oozing through your toes, the accumulation of a slow-motion rain of the few nearly invisible bits of silt and dust and diatom shells that somehow manage to slip through Baikal’s fine biological filter. Your feet settle into fresh lake bottom that’s already ancient—the top couple of inches alone take you back to the days before Spafary and Avvakum, before Genghis Khan, before the first tsars. You’re standing on the deepest spot on any of the world’s landmasses, more than a kilometer and a half below the surface of the lake and almost 1,200 meters below sea level.

It’s darker than space down here, and under a mile-thick blanket of water it’s as still and silent as any place on the planet. Here at the bottom of Baikal, it’s as if nothing ever existed or ever will. But it is alive. The muck. The water. The lake itself.

You feel it before you hear it—a dull shudder becomes an abyssal groan becomes an apocalyptic roar that barrels through the water and collapses your legs under you as the plates along the Baikal rift crack and shift like the vertebra of a continent-sized beast turning in its sleep. One of Baikal’s frequent earthquakes is reconfiguring the lake’s floor, as if the lake is determined to keep scientists busy, to keep its depth and breadth a moving target.

As the shudder finally recedes, you pick yourself up, switch on your headlamp, and find that you’ve got company in this place where it seems impossible that anything could live, where the pressure is unbearable and there has never been a ray of natural light. It seems impossible, but there it is: Hauling yourself through the gloom, you encounter globular gray flatworms and white gammarid shrimp, scouring the floor for tiny scraps of nutritive debris, completely blind but guided by highly developed senses of touch and smell. Perhaps you’ll encounter a curious sculpin of the family Abyssocottidae that haunts the lake’s deepest stretches and is among the most abyssal fish anywhere. You might even catch sight of a wandering golomyanka. Life is sparse down here, but a few hearty animals are able to scratch out a living, more than twice as far below the surface as in any other lake.