If you were accidentally to drop your keys into any of the world’s lakes, try not to drop them in Lake Baikal. The Siberian freshwater body is the deepest lake on earth.
With a maximum depth of 1,620 metres, Lake Baikal is more than 800 times deeper than the deep end of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, around ten times deeper than the English Channel, and twice as deep as the world’s tallest building – the Burj Khalifa – is tall.
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The reason for these hidden depths lies in the fact that Lake Baikal is located in a rift valley, where the Earth’s crust is continually being pulled apart. This means that, for as long as tectonic activity continues, the lake will only get deeper.
This is not the only weird thing about this UNESCO World Heritage site, however. Lake Baikal formed around 25 million years ago, so this makes it the oldest lake on earth.
Thanks to its age and isolation, there are species found here that exist nowhere else on Earth. This includes the world’s only freshwater seal, called the Baikal seal, and the Baikal oil fish or golomyanka, which is transparent and has no scales.
