Environmental Memoirs

I found this interesting website which has information about Russia and lake Baikal.
Click here -- to go to this page. Also there is some info on Great Baikal Trail (GBT).

Holiday in Siberia Part 1 - Baikal

An article by Edward on Slow Travel

Historically an invitation to Siberia came from Josef Stalin. Unlike Butlin’s it was to a rather different sort of camp, a gulag, or labour camp. Trips also tended to be one-way affairs, with many prisoners literally worked to death. The size and remoteness of Siberia allowed this barbaric activity to go on out of sight if not out of mind of most Russians. If Siberia was an independent nation it would still be one of the biggest countries in the world, and anywhere this size has got to have something special offer. And indeed it does!

We’ve just spent the last few days around Lake Baikal, the biggest single repository of freshwater on the planet. It’s awesome in scale. You could lose Scotland in it. If it wasn’t so far away some people might be tempted to try. It’s also currently frozen, covered with an incredible icy surface that creates a tempting white plain (up to 80km across) between the rugged black mountains that flank the water on either side. The ice is deceptive however, especially at this time of the year. During the numb winter months people happily drive 20 ton trucks across the surface on established ice roads. Come the spring melt it’s a different story. The ice softens unevenly and whilst it is safe in some areas, in others it becomes treacherously thin and downright dangerous. This year 11 vehicles have been lost and 9 people drowned in the deep dark icy waters when the apparently reliable ice has suddenly given way beneath them.

It was with this grisly fate in mind that we were somewhat thankful that the timing of our arrival on Olkhon Island (the biggest in the Lake) coincided with the deployment of a natty little ‘Padoushka’ or hovercraft. This enabled us to skim thrillingly over the ice safe in the knowledge that if it cracked we weren’t going through and into the depths below. And what depths. Baikal is 1637m deep at it’s most abyssal point, and as a result the water remains startlingly, scrotum-shrinkingly cold even in midsummer. It’s also terrifyingly clear with visibility up to 40m down resulting in some swimmers suffering from vertigo – not something you expect whilst taking a dip (but at least it might take your mind off your freezing testicles).

We are almost the first tourists of the season on the island too, only being beaten to this honour by a (very nice) German couple who arrived the day before. Typical. We later met them naked in the banya, so made friends perhaps more quickly and intimately than we might have anticipated. Yesterday however we were literally the only guests at the homestead and as such have been treated like slightly weird, if welcome, oddities. Last night we even had a personal concert on accordion and guitar (not simultaneously I hasten to add) by Nikola the care-taker (‘Because I take care of things’). It’s like being part of a small family and a world away from the summer hordes when the dining room has fed up to 350 people in a day in high season.

Far from the madding crowd. On an island. In the middle of a frozen lake. In Siberia. Bliss.

Peter Thomson

Peter Thomson is an independent writer, editor and radio producer. He’s the author of the acclaimed 2007 book Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal (Oxford University Press), which The New York Times called “superb” and “compelling,” and founding editor and producer of the groundbreaking NPR environmental news program Living on Earth.

New York Times Article on Baikal Warming

An article from NY Times

For direct link: click here.

Family Science Project Yields Surprising Data About a Siberian Lake

In 1945, when Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, Mikhail M. Kozhov began keeping track of what was happening under the surface of Lake Baikal, the ancient Siberian lake that is the deepest and largest body of fresh water on earth.

Every week to 10 days, by boat in summer and over the ice in winter, he crossed the lake to a spot about a mile and a half from Bolshie Koty, a small village in the piney woods on Baikal’s northwest shore. There, Dr. Kozhov, a professor at Irkutsk State University, would record water temperature and clarity and track the plant and animal plankton species as deep as 2,400 feet.

Soon his daughter Olga M. Kozhova began assisting him and, eventually her daughter, Lyubov Izmesteva, joined the project. They kept at it over the years, producing an extraordinary record of the lake and its health.

Now Dr. Izmesteva and scientists in the United States have analyzed the data and concluded, to their surprise, that the water in Lake Baikal is rapidly warming. As a result, its highly unusual food web is reorganizing, as warmer water species of plankton become more prevalent. These shifts at the bottom of the food web could have important implications for all of the creatures that live in the lake, they say.

Although Dr. Kozhov is famous among scientists who study lakes — his 1961 book “Lake Baikal and Its Life” is considered a classic — the new report is “the international debut of the Kozhov family’s legacy of research,” Stephanie E. Hampton of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an e-mail message.

She led the work along with Dr. Izmesteva who, like her mother and grandfather before her, is a professor at the university and a researcher at the biological field station it established in Bolshie Koty in 1918. Their findings are being reported this month in the journal Global Change Biology.

Like others who have seen the data, Dr. Hampton said in an interview that she was in awe of the people who had collected it. “Even in the spring, summer and fall, this is tough,” she said. “In the winter to go out a mile and a half on the ice and break through it to take water samples, in a year-round effort for 60 years, is pretty amazing to me. Every time I think about it I am humbled.”

Marianne V. Moore, an ecologist at Wellesley College and another researcher on the project, said she learned about the data in 2001 when she took students in her class, “Baikal and the Soul of Siberia,” to the lake. Dr. Izmesteva spoke to the group and showed a few slides, which the translator said had been drawn from a 60-year record. “I thought he had made a mistake,” Dr. Moore recalled. “So I basically ignored it.”

When she returned with another class two years later and another scientist mentioned the data, “my jaw dropped to the floor,” she said. “I realized this is just extraordinary.”

She got in touch with Dr. Hamilton, who is an expert in the analysis of complex ecological field data, particularly the use of statistical techniques to discern real trends in the messy ups and downs of nature. The center in Santa Barbara financed the collaboration.

Baikal is a place of unusual biodiversity, with many species found nowhere else. Among them are giant shrimp, bright green sponges that grow in shallow water forests and the Baikal seal, the world’s only exclusively freshwater seal. In 1996, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco, designated the lake a World Heritage Site.

Although it is known that warming is more intense at high latitudes, as in the Baikal area, and that water is warming in other major lakes, including Lake Tahoe in Nevada and Lake Tanganyika in central Africa, many scientists had thought that Lake Baikal’s enormous volume and unusual water circulation patterns would buffer the effects of global warming.

Instead, the researchers report, surface waters in Lake Baikal are warming quickly, on average by about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit every decade. At a depth of about 75 feet, the increase is about 0.2 degrees per decade, they say, enough to jeopardize species “unable to adapt evolutionarily or behaviorally.”

Over the last 137 years, the researchers say, the ice-free season has lengthened by more than two weeks, primarily because ice forms later in the year. The database, including data on chlorophyll that the family started collecting in 1979, suggest that the “growing season” for plankton and algae has lengthened in the lake. Chlorophyll levels have tripled since measurement began, the researchers said.

Ordinarily, the researchers said in their report, this increased plant growth would be accompanied by decreases in water clarity, but that is not what the data show at Lake Baikal. This finding, they said, “highlights the importance of establishing monitoring for ‘early warming’ before a need for monitoring may be perceived visually.”

Now, Dr. Hampton said, she and other researchers are examining how the Kozhov family’s data fit with records of ecological phenomena elsewhere. So far, she said, “the data correlate well.”

“You could not make up something like this.” she added.

Dr. Moore said Dr. Kozhov died in 1968 and his daughter Olga died in 2000. The family persisted in their work through years of political, economic and social turmoil, especially the collapse of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when, Dr. Moore said, “funds for the program just dried up.”

Today, she said, Dr. Izmesteva and her colleagues pay for their work in part with fees they earn by consulting or doing environmental impact assessments.

“They sustain the program any way they can,” Dr. Moore said.

Missing Russian Food?

After being removed from Baikal and Russia for over half a year now, I began to get nostalgic for nice Russian food, so I began my quest for a Russian grocery in London and discovered the wonderful Kalinka at 35 Queensway in London (Queensway or Bayswater tube). While most of the products are technically imported from Poland or Germany, you can find all your favorite Russian foods here (or introduce yourself to the delights of simple, tasty Russian food). The store's location near Hyde Park also makes it a great place to go pick up a picnic on a nice spring day. For our picnic, we went for the ‘peasant lunch’ buying two types of sausage, farmer’s chees, black rye bread, eggplant caviar, Russian pickles, and some kvass (Russian soda made from fermented bread) and apricot juice to wash it all down, and then finished with some poppyseed cake and spice cakes (just like on Baikal!). Kalinka is also a great place to buy things like buckwheat flour for a good price, get a nice bottle of vodka, or explore the interesting world of Russian candy.

For more culinary adventures in London, please visit http://peoplewhoeat.wordpress.com/