Wikipedia @ 25: Lake Baikal

To celebrate the site’s 25th birthday this year, Wikipedia is encouraging/challenging people to read one Wikipedia article a day for 25 consecutive days. I felt that I could do one better than that: not only reading an article but – where I found one that was particularly interesting – to write a blog post or record a podcast episode for each of those days, sharing what I learned. For each entry, I’ll hit “random article” a few times until something catches my interest, start reading, and then start writing! Everything I’ve written below came from Wikipedia… so you should check other sources before you use it to do your homework. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!

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Today’s random article: Baikal seal
Today’s topic: Lake Baikal

The Baikal seal is a species of “earless” seal that lives exclusively in Lake Baikal in Siberia. It’s one of only a tiny number of species of seal that spends its life only in freshwater: others, like the much more-widespread harbour seal (that I’ve occasionally seen around the UK), for example, can and will swim up rivers to hunt but mostly live in saltwater. But not the Baikal seal.

The Baikal seal is confined just to this one lake. Which sounds like a small area until you realise quite how large Lake Baikal is. The seventh-largest lake in the world, Lake Baikal is just a little larger than Belgium, but that really doesn’t do justice to its true volume, because it also happens to be the deepest lake in the world. It’s so deep that a fifth to a quarter of all the surface freshwater in the world is found in this one lake.

If you count frozen water in the ice caps and glaciers too, then Lake Baikal still contains about fifth of all the fresh water on Earth. That’s just amazing.

It’s quite so deep because it’s a rift lake: it sits close to the boundary between the Eurasian and Amur tectonic plates, which are shearing away from one another. For the same reason, there are volcanic hot springs deep in the lake (although the lake itself is so massive that they have no measurable effect on its overall temperature). There’s a lot of not-fully-understood geology going on in the region, despite active research going back over a century.

The Baikal seal isn’t the only species unique to the lake. It’s also home to a kind of fish called the omul, a salmon-like fish that’s long been part of the cuisine of the area.

It’s used to make raskolotka (known as stroganina elsewhere in Russia): thin slices of the meat cut almost to the entire length of the fish’s body and served as frozen curls. The particular shape of a traditional skinning Yakutian knife, which is sharpened to a curve on one-side and left flat on the other, is especially suited to this task, apparently:

Lake Baikal also hosts the Baikal Deep Underwater Neutrino Telescope, whose acronym BDUNT makes me think of bundt cakes. Which – Wikipedia tells me – nobody’s certain of the etymology of!

Anyway, the neutrino telescope is an SK-variety neutrino detector, spotting neutrinos zipping through the Earth when they just-ocassionally interact with the water, resulting in the creation of a high-energy electron or muon and the resulting short burst of Cherenkov radiation. Operated from the surface of the winter ice, the experiment aims to search for evidence of relic dark matter in the sun, among other astronomical phenomena.

It’s all interesting, but if there’s one thing I’ll take away from this daily deep-dive into a random Wikipedia topic, it’s this photo of a cute young Baikal seal:

I wonder what tomorrow’s random Wikipedia article will bring me! If it’s interesting, I’ll share it with you!