Baikal is a tectonic lake in the southern part of Eastern Siberia with an area of 31,722 km², the deepest lake on the planet, the largest natural reservoir of fresh water and the largest freshwater lake in Eurasia by area.
The lake and its coastal areas are a unique biogeocenosis, most of whose animal species are endemic. The lake has a drain – the Angara River.
The name of the lake is usually explained through the Turkic baiköl “rich lake”, as indicated by the modern Kazakh and Kyrgyz bai – “rich” and Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Altyn köl, Turkish göl – “lake”. The lake was named so because it is especially rich in a rare breed of salmon fish, which is caught here.
It is located in the center of Asia on the border of the Irkutsk region and the Republic of Buryatia in the Russian Federation. The lake stretches from the southwest to the northeast for 636 km in the form of a giant crescent. The width of the reservoir varies between 24 and 79 km. The bottom of Lake Baikal in its deepest part is 1187 meters below sea level. The elevation mark of the water’s edge of Lake Baikal is established (since Baikal is regulated) within the range of 456-457 meters above sea level, but in the Pacific height system. As a result, the “real” level of Baikal is actually unknown.
The area of the water surface of Baikal is 31,722 km² [3] (excluding islands), which is approximately equal to the area of such countries as Belgium or the Netherlands. In terms of water surface area, Baikal ranks seventh among the largest lakes in the world. The drainage basin area is 571 thousand km². The coastline is 2000 km long.
The lake is located in a unique basin, surrounded on all sides by mountain ranges and hills. The western coast is rocky and steep, the relief of the eastern coast is more gentle (in some places the mountains recede from the shore for tens of kilometers).
Baikal is the deepest lake on Earth. The current value of the maximum depth of the lake – 1642 m – was established in 1983 by L. G. Kolotilo and A. I. Sulimov during the hydrographic work of the expedition of the Main Directorate of Hydrology and Oceanology of the USSR Ministry of Defense at a point with coordinates 53 ° 14 ′ 59 ″ N 108 ° 05 ′ 11 ″ E. d.HGЯO.
The maximum depth was mapped in 1992 and confirmed in 2002 as a result of a joint Belgian-Spanish-Russian project to create a new bathymetric map of Lake Baikal, when depths were digitized at 1,312,788 points in the lake’s water area (the depth values were obtained by recalculating acoustic sounding data combined with additional bathymetric information, including echolocation and seismic profiling; one of the authors of the discovery of the maximum depth, L.G. Kolotilo, was a participant in this project).
If we take into account that the water surface of the lake is located at an altitude of 456 m above sea level, then the lowest point of the basin lies 1187 m below sea level, which makes the Baikal bowl also one of the deepest continental depressions.
The average depth of the lake is also very large – 744.4 m. It exceeds the maximum depths of many very deep lakes. Apart from Baikal, there are only two lakes on Earth that are deeper than 1000 meters: Tanganyika (1470 m) and the Caspian Sea (1025 m).
Wholesale supplies of drinking water from Lake Baikal around the world: BaikalH2O.com
