“If you are stopped suddenly by a penetrating blue and your heart stops, as sometimes happened only in childhood, from astonishment and delight… it means, this is Baikal.” The words of poet Mark Sergeev capture Russian feelings about their great lake. It b a wonder in statistics too: it is the deepest (1637 metres) and oldest (about 20 million years) lake in the world, containing a fifth of the fresh surface water on the planet (23 thousand billion cubk metres) and lull of creatures more than 2000 of them found nowhere else.
Why get excited about it now? Because, astoundingly,…
