The deepest, largest, oldest lake in the world still harbors secrets
STORY BY JUSTIN HOUSMAN
Lake Baikal is 25 million to 30 million years old, give or take a year.
At 5,354 feet, it’s nearly three times deeper than Lake Tahoe.
It holds 5,521 cubic miles of water, about the size of all five Great Lakes combined.
Which adds up to 22 percent of all freshwater on the planet.
2,000 endemic species live there. One of them probably isn’t the Lusud-Khan, a fabled lake monster that resembles a giant, armor-plated sturgeon. But you can’t prove it’s not there.
The world’s only exclusively freshwater seal, the nerpa, calls Baikal home. How it got there is a mystery.Winter brings a spectacular display of white bubbles trapped in the lake ice. These come from methane; the largest are three miles wide and were discovered by the International Space Station.
Winter is expedition season. The first documented crossing, done on foot, was in 2003 by a German team of two.
Crossings in winter typically take 20 to 30 days to travel 398 miles from the
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