Lake Baikal: A biological treasure trove | SLICE

[Music] think there's not much life here but actually if you just lift a stone very gently you realize it's teeming with life [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so in the heart of siberia baikal is a lake of extremes 637 meters deep and 636 kilometers long it contains nearly 20 of the world's fresh water its waters are the purest on earth its climate is one of the harshest dropping as low as minus 50 degrees celsius in winter but neither ice wind nor the interminable winter can hamper the development of an animal and plant life that is unique in the world in this grandiose and hostile nature men and women have chosen to lead a rare and remarkable existence [Music] [Music] [Music] located 1500 kilometers north of mongolia baikal lies right in the heart of asia it contains as much water as all the american great lakes combined russians call it their great sacred sea for more than 20 years sashayakovlev has been traveling the lake up and down here near okon island it's the beginning of march and the arrival of spring has broken up the ice erecting a chaos of icy barriers that are tough to cross sasha transports goods and often provides the only link between the lake's inhabitants he knows when it's possible to forge through or when he needs to turn back because unlike my call the ice always has the last word even when it's over a meter thick the lake's ice remains alive subjected to powerful internal forces huge blocks of ice collide long cracks form and actual walls rise up these barriers are what we call ice they form very easily when the lake starts to freeze the layer of ice is torn up and carried by the wind the pieces are blown into certain spots and pile up to form barriers like this these vertical ice sheets can loom 10 to 12 meters high but they are not the only danger lurking for travelers fractures can appear and stretch for several kilometers depending on the temperature and weather conditions they either contract or expand sometimes leaving a gap two meters wide i've fallen in the water before it happened last year on april 26th i was driving along on an old fischer and in those spots the ice disappears much faster and becomes more fragile so there we were and the car sank right in the middle of baikal we didn't even bother trying to get it out very few people live along the shores of this immense lake there is only one city in the north severo by kosk with just twenty thousand people the south boasts a handful of small villages whose total population is under fifty thousand for hundreds of kilometers between these two outermost points there is not a single road nor barely a soul over two-thirds of baikal's shores are completely untouched and uninhabited [Music] this pristine environment is home to a host of animal and plant species some of which are found nowhere else on earth how did such rich biodiversity develop how do these animals manage to survive and what is their relationship with lake baikal over the past few decades national parks have been created around the lake [Music] here in the baikal lena nature reserve sergey and natasha chaburov are on a mission to protect and study this unique environment but she has chosen to live here with her husband in a cabin that measures only 12 square meters is one of the reserve's forest rangers by the size and height of these scratches i'd say the bear is about four or five years old an average sized bed [Music] the animals you find most frequently throughout the reserve are [Music] and for carnivores you find brown bear soon they'll be done with that breakfast and go off to rest until evening i think along our coast there are about 300 deer within a territory that stretches 110 kilometers long while sergey trams through the forest natasha takes samples each day for the reserves biological studies lab because baikal's underwater life is just as rich as that on land though the lake's water is very cold in winter it is still home to countless species my job is to study lakes or more specifically zooplankton which i've been studying for 20 years this zone hasn't been studied much by hydrogeologists so it's a bit like virgin territory here in baikal these planktonic organisms are what make the water so clean particularly the crustaceans and notably the epistura bica lenses this tiny organism is what allows us to call baikal a self-cleaning lake all these sponges and epistura filter the water and keep it as clean as possible baikal's water is reputed to be the purest in the world [Music] scientists have long wondered how the lake manages to rid itself of impurities to find out one must be prepared to dive into three-degree water you realize it's teeming with life one of the lake's most surprising endemic species is a strange creature called goopkey [Music] they almost look like water plants the way they flutter in the current but goobke are actually primitive animals freshwater sponges with no organs their vivid green color come from the algae they live in symbiosis [Music] is able to filter close to 20 liters of water a day the water and everything else there is passes through the sponges for instance organic residue the remains of algae or other dead organisms all collects on the surface obviously the pores where the water flows through and is filtered would get clogged if no one was around to clean them uh but a large quantity of different organisms exist by cleaning these spongy's bodies have lived in the lake for over 3 million years and are a genuine biological treasure without them the lake's water wouldn't be as transparent the exceptional purity of the water has made it possible to set up an uncommon scientific instrument in the lake composed of a string of underwater spheres the baikal deep underwater neutrino telescope is an electronic eye fixed on the stars [Music] it tirelessly peruses the heavens in search of evasive elementary particles neutrinos [Music] these particles travel at the speed of light and are emitted by some of the most spectacular cosmic events in the universe such as solar eruptions or supernovas neutrinos have virtually no mass and travel through interstellar space unstopped by any obstacles they encounter they pass straight through the earth from one side to the other which slows them down and makes it possible to observe them it takes an enormous quantity of the purest water possible for the neutrino detector to function and there are few places on earth that fulfill these conditions as perfectly as lake baikal [Music] [Music] are the most transparent of any lake in the world it is also the deepest lake lake baikal our common treasure has made it possible to gather this scientific this detector may one day transform the way we see our universe the depths of the lake harbor a multitude of other secrets [Music] some are known only to geologists who have plumbed the rocky strata several kilometers beneath the frozen surface of the lake in cacoosi in the north of the lake inhabitants enjoy the hot springs with little concern that the healing vapors are caused by intense volcanic activity or that the earth's crust is much thinner here than elsewhere in the world [Music] you

Channel: SLICE

Views: 3,012,326

Keywords: documentary, documentaries, shortdoc, shortdocs, slice, slicedocs, baikal, lake, lake baikal, russia, biodiversity, water, pure water, fresh water, frozen, ice, snow, russian, sea, ecosystem, animals, nature

Id: SAcReQHYnuE

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021