"Like the Galapagos, Baikal is a closed ecosystem"

December 3, 2015 8:17 AM

The Blue Pearl Of Siberia, Peter Matthiessen, 1991

Past eight in the evening on the last day of August, after a ten-hour climb, we haul ourselves to the high rim of the Baikal Canyon. From where we stand, high plateaus, in hard, clear light, seem to stretch forever westward to the Urals. Facing east, my companion, the huge Siberian woodsman Semyon Ustinov, spreads his long arms. Far below, his beloved Baikal, the most ancient lake on earth, is shrouded in mist that drifts up the steep talus slope as if in search of us. The canyon rim on which we stand is a mile or more above the surface of the lake, whose greatest depth is 6,300 feet, or 1.2 miles, with an additional four miles of sediment above the bedrock. The great Baikal rift is seven times as deep as the Grand Canyon, by far the deepest land depression on the planet.

Lake Baikal: The Pearl of Siberia

Siberian Adventures on Lake Baikal

Ian Frazier, 2009: Travels In Siberia - I
Travels In Siberia - II

posted by the man of twists and turns (14 comments total)

"...the nerpa, the only fresh water seal on earth..."

How the hell does a seal get to Lake Baikal?
posted by clawsoon at 8:48 AM on December 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

practice.
posted by 7segment at 8:50 AM on December 3, 2015 [9 favorites]

How the hell does a seal get to Lake Baikal?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by the man of twists and turns at 8:52 AM on December 3, 2015 [2 favorites]

I guess it swam up the Angara River.
posted by clawsoon at 9:01 AM on December 3, 2015

Just want to say the Ian Frazier book (from which the linked articles are excerpted) is amazing and everyone should read it. The man actually learned Russian so he could really experience the country, and of course he's a superb writer.
posted by languagehat at 9:21 AM on December 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I sought out the Frazier book after reading about it here on Metafilter and wouldn't agree with languagehat's enthusiastic review of it. It wasn't terrible but it wasn't brilliant either.

One of the reasons I sought it out is that I've long wanted to visit Baikal. I grew up near the North American Great Lakes and Baikal is in several ways the greatest body of fresh water on the planet. These days, though, the lake is in trouble -- dumping of industrial pollution and human waste is damaging the lake's ecosystem and several invasive species of water plants are running wild in the lake.
posted by Nerd of the North at 10:02 AM on December 3, 2015 [1 favorite]

I've been slowly making my way through Mathiessen's The Snow Leopard, and it's every bit as precise and awestruck in its descriptions as this piece is. Definitely recommended.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 12:25 PM on December 3, 2015

> I sought out the Frazier book after reading about it here on Metafilter and wouldn't agree with languagehat's enthusiastic review of it. It wasn't terrible but it wasn't brilliant either.

Just curious: what didn't you like about it?
posted by languagehat at 1:22 PM on December 3, 2015

Mathiessen's writing, observations, I learn from him every time I read. I should just read it all. His description is so poetic as to accurately mirror the poetry that is the natural world.
posted by Oyéah at 2:20 PM on December 3, 2015

Construction was about to begin when, in 1961, Dr. Grigori Galazi, director of the Limnological Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences at nearby Irkutsk, warned that the cellulose plant together with a smaller combine in the Selenga River would do permanent damage to the lake’s ecological balance. Alarmed articles soon set in motion an organized defense of the sacred lake that most citizens would never see, yet which was to become the emblem and first battleground of the USSR’s environmental struggle. (In the same period the Siberian writer Sergei Zalygin, now the editor of Novy Mir, spoke out against the planned construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Ob River that would have flooded an enormous tract to the northwest. The Soviet environmental movement had begun.)

1961!

Good for them.
posted by bukvich at 3:41 PM on December 3, 2015

I sought out the Frazier book after reading about it here on Metafilter and wouldn't agree with languagehat's enthusiastic review of it. It wasn't terrible but it wasn't brilliant either.

Yeah, that was my feel too. I read it during my cold-places binge back in 2010 and I didn't connect with this; something about the language put me at a remove from the very subject. By contrast, Bill Streever's Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air sucked me right into their chilly epic collisions of science and history.
posted by sobell at 3:49 PM on December 3, 2015

I was doing a Google image search of Baikal Lake (highly recommended!) and came across this. A 195 mile ultra marathon across the frozen surface. The Internet is littered with blogs of people who dropped out. It's run in teams and apparently falling through the ice is not unusual.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 6:51 PM on December 3, 2015

Rasputin's NYTimes obit. (He died in March 2015.)

In a reflection of Mr. Rasputin’s stature, Patriarch Kirill I of the Russian Orthodox Church led his funeral service at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow on Wednesday, and President Vladimir V. Putin paid his respects on Tuesday.
posted by bukvich at 4:53 AM on December 4, 2015

> I read it during my cold-places binge back in 2010 and I didn't connect with this; something about the language put me at a remove from the very subject. By contrast, Bill Streever's Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places and Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air sucked me right into their chilly epic collisions of science and history.

Ah, well, if you were reading it for a cold-places fix, I can understand: that's not what it's about. But it's mainly non-Russians who think Siberia = cold; Frazier was thinking of it more as an important but too-little-known part of Russia, and if you approach it with the desire to learn more about that I don't think you'll be disappointed. (Not putting down the desire for a cold-places fix—my brother is like that too!)
posted by languagehat at 9:47 AM on December 4, 2015