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Climate Change Claims A Beauty

Climate change claimed another victim this week when a new study by Russian and American scientists confirmed that the world’s largest lake, Lake Baikal, shows signs of unexpected strains from global warming.

Lake Baikal is large enough to hold all the water in the United States’ Great Lakes and contains 20% of the world’s freshwater. The lake is also the world’s deepest and oldest — 25 million years old. The new report identifying the symptoms of global warming in the ecology of the remote Siberian lake appeared today in the journal Global Change Biology.

“Warming of this isolated but enormous lake is a clear signal that climate change has affected even the most remote corners of our planet,” said Stephanie Hampton, one of the report’s principal investigators and a researcher at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

The report details the effects of climate change on Lake Baikal, ranging from warming of its vast waters to reorganization of its microscopic food web.

Lake Baikal is the grand dame of lakes. In 1996, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared it a World Heritage site because of its biological diversity. It boasts 2500 plant and animal species, with most, including the freshwater seal, found nowhere else in the world.