Skip to main content

Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal

Lake Baikal is a rift lake located in Russia situated in southern Siberia between the federal subjects of Irkutsk Oblast to the northwest and Buryatia to the southeast. With 23,615.39 km3 (5,670 cu mi) of water, Lake Baikal is the world's largest freshwater lake by volume, containing 22–23% of the world's fresh surface water, more than all of the North American Great Lakes combined. It is the world's deepest lake, with a maximum depth of 1,642 m (5,387 ft), and the world's oldest lake, at 25–30 million years. At 31,722 km2 (12,248 sq mi)—slightly larger than Belgium—it is the world's seventh-largest lake by surface area. It is among the world's clearest lakes. Baikal is home to thousands of species of plants and animals, many of them endemic to the region. It is also home to Buryat tribes, who raise goats, camels, cattle, sheep, and horses on the eastern side of the lake, where the mean temperature varies from a winter minimum of −19 °C (−2 °F) to a summer maximum of 14 °C (57 °F). The region to the east of Lake Baikal is referred to as Transbaikalia or as the Transbaikal, and the loosely defined region around the lake itself is sometimes known as Baikalia. UNESCO declared Lake Baikal a World Heritage Site in 1996.
 

Labels:
Location: Lake Baikal, Russia

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chilean Blob

Chilean Blob The Chilean Blob was a large mass of tissue found on Pinuno Beach in Los Muermos, Chile in July 2003. It weighed 13 tonnes (14 tons) and measured 12 metres (39 ft) across. The Chilean Blob made headlines around the world because biologists were initially unable to identify it, and were speculating that it was the remains of some species of giant octopus previously unknown to science. In June 2004, DNA found in the blob was found to match that of a sperm whale: the blob was a large mass of adipose tissue, the partial remains of a dead sperm whale.  
Post a Comment
Read more

Panama Creature

Panama Creature The "Panama Creature" (also variously referred to as the "Panama Monster", "Panama ET" "Cerro Azul Monster", "Blue Stream Monster" or "Blue Hill Horror") refers to a carcass photographed near the town of Cerro Azul, Panama, in September 2009. After the animal was discovered and reputedly killed by a group of teenagers, photographs of the corpse were given to Telemetro, a Panamanian television station. The story and pictures circulated, and comparisons to the Montauk Monster were made. There was speculation about the identity of the creature, with suggestions including a hairless sloth, an alien species and a creature new to science. A biopsy performed by the National Environmental Authority of Panama on the remains a few days after the creature's discovery concluded that the corpse was in fact that of a male brown-throated sloth. The odd appearance had been caused by underwater decomposition, which had resu...
Post a Comment
Read more

St. Augustine Monster

 St. Augustine Monster The St. Augustine Monster is the name given to a large carcass, originally postulated to be the remains of a gigantic octopus, that washed ashore on the United States coast near St. Augustine, Florida in 1896. It is sometimes referred to as the Florida Monster or the St. Augustine Giant Octopus and is one of the earliest recorded examples of a globster. The species that the carcass supposedly represented has been assigned the binomial names Octopus giganteus (Latin for "giant octopus") and Otoctopus giganteus (Greek prefix: oton = "ear"; "giant-eared octopus"), although these are not valid under the rules of the ICZN. A 1995 analysis concluded that the St. Augustine Monster was a large mass of the collagenous matrix of whale blubber, likely from a sperm whale.
Post a Comment
Read more