The deepest lake in the world, reaching 1,642 metres
Its floor lies more than 1,180 m below sea level
Geography · Physical geography
Lake Baikal
Russia — southern Siberia, between Irkutsk Oblast and Buryatia
The deepest lake on Earth at 1,642 metres, and the largest by volume: it holds about 23,600 cubic kilometres of water, roughly a fifth of all the world's unfrozen surface fresh water. It is also the oldest lake in the world, at least 25 million years old, sitting in an active continental rift that is still widening, and about four-fifths of its thousands of species live nowhere else.
How to spot them
- ▸The world's deepest lake, and the one holding the most fresh water
- ▸Quiz clue: 'nerpa', 'omul', 'Olkhon', 'Angara', 'Selenga', 'Irkutsk'
- ▸The only lake in the world with a species of freshwater seal
- ▸At least 25 million years old, and sitting in a rift that is still pulling apart
Key facts
It holds about a fifth of the world's unfrozen surface fresh water
Some 23,600 km³ — more than all five North American Great Lakes combined
At around 25 million years old, it is the oldest lake on Earth
Most lakes silt up and vanish within tens of thousands of years
Home to the world's only exclusively freshwater seal
The nerpa, Pusa sibirica; how it reached landlocked Siberia is still debated
More than three hundred rivers flow in, and only one flows out
The Angara, which drains north-west past Irkutsk to the Yenisei
In winter it freezes over so clearly that cars and a stretch of railway once crossed the ice
Ice up to two metres thick; during the Russo-Japanese War rails were laid across it
The transparent, oily little golomyanka fish gives birth to live young and has no scales
One of the lake's roughly 2,000 endemic species
Quick-fire facts
- •Maximum depth 1,642 m, making it the deepest lake in the world
- •Volume about 23,600 km³ — roughly 20% of the planet's unfrozen fresh surface water
- •Age at least 25 million years; it is the world's oldest lake
- •Its surface area, about 31,700 km², ranks only seventh in the world — it is depth, not extent, that makes it exceptional
- •It lies in the Baikal Rift Zone, which is still widening by around two centimetres a year
- •Around 80% of its 2,000-plus animal species are endemic, including the nerpa seal and the golomyanka
- •The Selenga, rising in Mongolia, is its largest inflow; the Angara is its only outflow
- •It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996
- •Common misconception: it is not the world's largest lake by area — that is the Caspian Sea — only by volume and depth
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Sources
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Lake Baikal
- Nikolai A. Logachev — The Baikal Rift Zone