Better not to try and, instead, just turn over on your back and enjoy the bizarre wonder of a lake in which it may be almost impossible to drown. This just in: Life-forms have been found associated with freshwater springs at the bottom of the Dead Sea. Time for a name change? Lake Titicaca. At 12, feet above sea level in a high valley in the Andes Mountains, the giant Lake Titicaca is the loftiest lake commercially navigable by large boats and contains more water than any other lake in South America.
Its two main ports are Puno, Peru—a beautiful old town steeped in Incan history—and Challapampa, Bolivia. Get yourself a fishing rod and a canoe, and go.
Melissani Cave Lake. Locals allegedly knew about the Melissani Cave Lake in Greece all along, but if they did, the world never heard about it until , when an earthquake caused a collapse of rock, exposed the crystal-clear lake and brought sunlight and color to its waters for the first time. The lake has since gained fame—and it happens to be located on the island that Homer named as the home country of Odysseus.
Wuhua Hai Lake. Widely lauded as one of the most beautiful lakes on earth, Wuhua Hai is located in Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve, in the high mountains of Sichuan, China. The waters are emerald blue and clear as air, and over the shallow lake bed lie scores of sunken logs visible from above the surface.
Plitvice Lakes. The dense green woods surrounding the lakes are home to bears, wolves, eagles and numerous other creatures protected in this national park and Unesco World Heritage site. Aral Sea. A reminder of the devastating effects of agriculture gone haywire, the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan has just about dried up since The two rivers that fed this once-giant inland sea rivers feed Baikal, for comparison no longer get there, diverted to fields instead.
Salton Sea. For years the Salton Sea was a productive fishery, but today its increasingly saline waters are so polluted that huge fish die-offs keep the shores littered with decay and rot, and fishermen are advised not to eat the corvina and tilapia they catch. The cause of the heat is unknown. During the summer, when the lake is full of melted ice from the Siberian mountains, it is sometimes possible to see more than feet 39 m down.
The stunning clarity is the result of the melted ice's purity, plankton that eat floating debris and a lack of mineral salts in the lake. Lake Baikal may be warmer than other parts of Siberia, but in the winter it still gets very cold. The average air temperature in winter is minus 6 F minus 21 C. The ice can be up to 6 feet 2 m thick. In the summer, the average air temperature is 52 F 11 C. The water temperature in August is around 50 F 10 C. At least 25 million years old, Lake Baikal is the oldest lake in the world.
It and the surrounding mountains were formed by the Earth's crust fracturing and moving. According to Baikal World Web, it was probably originally a riverbed, but tremors and fractures in the Earth's crust increased the size and widened the space between the shores. Parts of the Baikal basin developed at different times throughout the Tertiary Period 66 million to 2.
Melting glaciers also increased the water levels. It is likely that a series of lakes, similar to the Great Lakes, developed first and then united in the Pliocene Epoch 5. There are several theories about what could have caused the unification, including sinking earth, falling rocks, erosion and earthquakes. Likely, it was a combination of all factors. Lake Baikal is in a rift valley and up to 2, earthquake tremors are detected each year. The earthquakes deepen the lake and increase its size.
For example, an earthquake resulted in the creation of Proval Bay, according to Irkutsk. According to the Baikal Center, some geophysicists think that Lake Baikal is an ocean being born. The shores drift farther apart by 2 cm 0. Indigenous communities have lived around Lake Baikal since at least the sixth century B. It was the site of a battle in the Han-Xiongu War B. Local legend holds that Jesus visited Lake Baikal, according to Smithsonian magazine. Russia expanded its territory to include Lake Baikal during the 17th-century Russian conquest of Siberia.
The age, isolation and deep oxygenated water of Lake Baikal have resulted in one of the world's richest freshwater ecosystems. About 80 percent of the more than 3, species found at Lake Baikal are endemic, meaning they are found nowhere else on Earth. Probably the most famous of these species is the nerpa, the world's only exclusively freshwater seal. Scientists are unsure how the nerpa came to Lake Baikal and evolved, but they suspect the seals might have swum down a prehistoric river from the Arctic, according to LakeBaikal.
Other endemic species include the oily, scaleless golomyanka fish and the omul, a white fish that is one of Lake Baikal's most famous dishes. Situated in south-east Siberia, the 3. Known as the 'Galapagos of Russia', its age and isolation have produced one of the world's richest and most unusual freshwater faunas, which is of exceptional value to evolutionary science.
Situado al sudeste de Siberia, este lago tiene una superficie de 3. Het 3,15 miljoen hectare grote Baikal meer is het oudste 25 miljoen jaar oud en diepste 1. Een van de meest opvallende soorten is de Baikal zeehond. Het gebied kent verder een grote verscheidenheid aan planten, waarvan een aantal inheems. Ten westen van het meer zijn er lichte naaldbossen en bergsteppen. In het gebied ten oosten domineren dennen- en loofbossen.
The Committee inscribed Lake Baikal as the most outstanding example of a freshwater ecosystem on the basis of natrual criteria vii , viii , ix and x. The lake contains an outstanding variety of endemic flora and fauna, which is of exceptional value to evolutionary science. It is also surrounded by a system of protected areas that have high scenic and other natural values. The Committee took note of the confirmation of the revised boundaries of the site, which correspond to the core areas defined in the Baikal Law excluding the five urban developed areas.
It also noted that the special Lake Baikal Law is now in its second reading in the Duma.
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