Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
Home
books
ecology
Latest info
from space
Encyclopedia
Animals
Plants
Climat
Research
The world beneath Baikal
Geology
Circumbaikal railroad
Photogallery # 1 Photogallery # 2
Photogallery
#3
Listvyanka
Natives
In German
Word of poet
Olkhon island
Earthwatch
Shopping
Travel
agences
Guestbook
On all sides the Baikal hollow is surrounded by mountains: on the western shore the
lake is closely rimmed by the Primorsky and Baikalsky Ranges, with their maximum
height of 2,678 metres.
On the eastern side, Baikal is fringed by the
Barguzinsky and Ulan-Burgasy Ranges, and in the
south and south-east by the Khamar-Daban Range,
with its summit named Munku-Sardyk (eternally
snowy) reaching 3,491 metres above sea level. The
tops of the ranges and the valleys of the rivers
flowing down the Baikalsky, Barguzinsky, Khamar-Daban Ranges, evince rather
distinct traces of local mountain-valley glaciating. The last 250 thousand years
witnessed not less than 5 serious cold spells, and the last one only 10-15 thousand
years ago.
The northern part of Lake Baikal is the shallowest, with a maximum depth of 890
metres. Baikal and the mountains surrounding it came into existence due to fracturing
and movement of the earth's crust, resulting from tension inside the Earth itself. The
major geologic feature of the Baikal Territory is that it incorporates the borderline of
the great tectonic structures - the Siberian platform and its framing and the SayanoBaikalsky folded belt. Tectonic movements along this border never cease and are
manifested by earthquakes and by fluctuations of separate parts of the shores.
Annually, the ground seismic stations register up to 2,000 earthquake tremors; the
most sensitive seismographs, installed at various depths of the lake, identify them
more frequently. In 1862, north of the Selenga's delta, an area of land of about 200
square kilometres sank under water to a depth of 2 metres as the result of an
earthquake whose magnitude, as A. Voznesensky stated, reached magnitude 11. (This
Coastal and Marine Geology Program > Lake Baikal - A Touchstone for Global Change and Rift Studies
The special environmental and geological settings of Lake Baikal provide unparalleled
opportunities for research and for international
cooperation.
Lake Baikal is to Russia what the Grand Canyon is to the
United States: a magnificent natural resource that instills
national pride and awe. The Presidents of the United
States and the Russian Federation recognized the
uniqueness of Lake Baikal. In a recent Joint Statement,
they affirm the need to conserve the environment of
Lake Baikal and to use its potential for research in
Map showing location of Lake Baikal and
limnology, geology, and global climate change. The U.S. associated rift basins. [larger version]
Geological Survey's (USGS) Office of Energy and
Marine Geology and Office of International Geology, supported by the Coastal Geology
Program and the Global Change and Climate History Program, are involved in broad
collaborative programs to study Lake Baikal with the Russian Academy of Sciences and with a
number of American universities through the (U.S.) National Science Foundation.
Understanding the origin of the Lake Baikal rift contributes to understanding one of the
fundamental phenomena by which the history of the Earth is reconstructed.
Continental rifts, like the Lake Baikal rift, and their end products, such as passive continental
margins like the east coast of the United States, are ubiquitous in the Earth's geologic record.
They contain information from which a significant amount of the Earth's history has been
interpreted. Due to their high sedimentation rates, large rift lakes like Lake Baikal have great
potential for providing high-resolution information about both tectonic and climatic change.
Significantly, sedimentary deposits of continental rifts are also associated with many of the
Earth's hydrocarbon and mineral deposits.
USGS and Russian cooperative studies have begun to resolve the three-dimensional
geometry of the Lake Baikal rift.
United States and Russian studies of sediment cores taken from Lake Baikal provide a
detailed record of climatic variation over the past 250,000 years.
Much attention is focused on numerical models of climate change but there have been few means
for reliably testing or modifying boundary conditions of general circulation models. Studies of
sedimentary environments in Lake Baikal provide important opportunities to establish ground
truth for general circulation models. Very little data exist for long-term climate change from
continental interiors; most of the data record derives from the marine or maritime environments.
Finally, studies of past environments contribute to understanding the extent to which human
activity affects natural conditions in the lake.
Seismic and sediment core analyses are used to fix future drilling sites in Lake Baikal.
Ice-based drilling operations begun in early 1993 are providing longer (over 100 meters in
length) cores of Baikal sediments. Analyses of these cores are expected to reveal the climatic,
environmental, and geological history of the region as far back as 5 million years. Seismic data
will be tied to cores and drill samples to estimate rates of climate change and to map the history
of the lake and rift. Very deep drilling in Lake Baikal remains technologically challenging;
therefore, the deepest deposits of the rift are not likely to be sampled soon. However, the
potentially very long record of sedimentation in Lake Baikal provides unique opportunities to
understand the Cenozoic climate history of the Earth and to describe how continents begin to
break apart, giving rise to new ocean basins.
Contact Information
Dr. Deborah Hutchinson
U.S. Geological Survey
384 Woods Hole Rd
Woods Hole, MA 02543
Phone: (508) 457-2263
Fax: (508) 457-2310
Email: dhutchinson@usgs.gov
http://pubs.usg
s.gov/fs/baikal/