EGU25-16245, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-16245
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Constraining the environmental and anthropogenic impacts on Lake Baikal: the world’s oldest lake
George Swann1, Sarah Roberts2, Virginia Panizzo1, Anson Mackay3, Elena Vologina4, Natalia Piotrowska5, Michael Sturm6, and Suzanne McGowan7
George Swann et al.
  • 1School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK (george.swann@nottingham.ac.uk)
  • 2UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK
  • 3Environmental Change Research Centre, Department of Geography, UCL, London, UK
  • 4Institute of Earth's Crust, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Irkutsk, Russia
  • 5Division of Geochronology and Environmental Isotopes, Institute of Physics - CSE, Silesian University of Technology, Konarskiego 22B, 44-100 Gliwice, Poland
  • 6Eawag-ETH, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, 8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland
  • 7Department of Aquatic Ecology, Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW), Wageningen, Netherlands

Lake Baikal is the world's oldest lake, lying in a rift zone in south eastern Siberia that began to form over 20 million years ago. In addition to containing c. 20% of global surface freshwater, the lake contains a high degree of biodiversity with over 2,500 flora and fauna, the majority of which are endemic. As such, Lake Baikal is cited as the “most outstanding example of a freshwater ecosystem” and this, together with its high level of endemicity, led to the lake being designated a World Heritage Site in 1996.

Industrial development, changes in catchment land-use and anthropogenic climate change raise serious concerns over the future sustainability of the lake's unique ecosystem. This presentation combines new chlorophyll and carotenoid pigment analyses from sediment cores across the lake, together with geochemical and observational records from the region, to document how the ecosystem and limnological conditions of Lake Baikal have evolved over the last 2,000 years.

With results showing that significant changes in the lake ecosystem began in the 20th Century, we assess the extent to which these changes can be attributed to economic development in Lake Baikal’s catchment and/or to global anthropogenic climate change. Our findings show a clear link between changes in the lake biotic assemblages and climate change, driven by declines in seasonal lake ice-cover over the last 100 years.

How to cite: Swann, G., Roberts, S., Panizzo, V., Mackay, A., Vologina, E., Piotrowska, N., Sturm, M., and McGowan, S.: Constraining the environmental and anthropogenic impacts on Lake Baikal: the world’s oldest lake, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-16245, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-16245, 2025.