This photo shows winter ice on Lake Baikal. In the future there may not be as much ice on this lake during the winter because of global warming.
Click on image for full size
Courtesy of Lyubov Izmest'eva
Global Warming Affects World's Largest Freshwater Lake
News story originally written on April 30, 2008
For the past 60 years, scientists have been collecting and analyzing water samples from Lake Baikal. They have discovered that temperature of this lake is rising, which means that this part of the world is experiencing global warming.
The lake, named Lake Baikal , is the world's deepest and oldest lake. It contains 20 percent of the world's freshwater, so it is large enough to hold all the water in the United States' Great Lakes.
Stephanie Hampton, one of the scientists working on this study, said, "Warming of this isolated but enormous lake is a clear signal that climate change has affected even the most remote corners of our planet."
The data from the lake shows that the surface waters have warmed significantly and that the food web in this lake has had long-term changes. Scientists used to think that Lake Baikal would be the least likely to experience climate change because it has so much water in it.
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