Lake Baikal, (continued)

"Lake Baikal gives off its own energy," says scientist Tatyana Sitnikova, looking out over the lake from the deck of the G. Titov research ship.

"I studied in Leningrad for a while, and can remember passing by St. Isaac's cathedral every day on my way to the institute. The first few times I thought, 'Wow, what a beautiful cathedral.' But after that, I found it boring. "It's just a pile of stones, a dead thing. But Baikal is alive. It is always changing; it has a life of its own. I couldn't wait to get back here."

Tatyana has studied the mollusks of Lake Baikal for 20 years. "On every expedition we find something new," she says. "Just look at the size of this lake! Will we ever be able to say with certainty that we've found everything in it that there is to be found?"

For generations of Russians and Buryats, Baikal is more than just a lake: it is an embodiment of the sacred and the pristine. Nestled among the steppes and mountains of eastern Siberia, Baikal is an unrivaled natural phenomenon, a lake of depth and clarity that cannot be matched by any other body of fresh water on earth.

The lake, which was formed 25 million years ago, is the world's oldest, and with recorded depths of more than 1,600 meters (one mile) in some spots, it is the world's deepest. It holds nearly one-fifth of the earth's fresh water -- comparable to the amount of water in North America's Great Lakes, even though they have eight times the surface area.



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