What do you think of this fact?
How much water can a lake hold? For Lake Baikal in Siberia, the answer is: an unimaginable amount. It holds several world records at once.
Deeper than any other lake
Lake Baikal lies in southern Siberia, Russia. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), it’s up to 1,638 meters (5,374 feet) deep. That makes it the deepest lake on Earth. Stack one skyscraper on top of another and you’d need dozens to reach from the bottom to the surface.
According to UNESCO, which protects the lake as a World Heritage Site, it’s also about 25 million years old. That makes it the oldest lake in the world. Most lakes, by contrast, formed after the last ice age and are much younger.
A fifth of the fresh water
The most impressive record is about volume. According to UNESCO, Lake Baikal holds about 20 percent of the Earth’s unfrozen fresh water. So roughly one in every five liters of liquid fresh water on the planet sits in this one lake.
That’s mainly down to its enormous depth. On the surface, it doesn’t look that huge, but it goes a long way down.
Bonus fact: According to the IUCN, about 2,640 animal species live in Lake Baikal. About 56 percent of them live there and nowhere else in the world.
One famous example is the Baikal seal. It’s one of the few seal species that live only in fresh water.
Because the lake is so old, animals and plants around Baikal have had a very long time to adapt to its special conditions. Over millions of years, many species evolved that exist only here.
In winter, the lake freezes over. People skate, cycle and even drive cars on the ice. Beneath them lies more than a kilometer of water. A lake that could pass for a small sea.