Lake Baikal in Winter: Clear Ice on the World’s Deepest Lake

Lake Baikal in southern Siberia is the deepest and oldest lake on Earth: 1,642 m at its deepest point and around 25 million years old. In winter its surface freezes into clear, glassy ice laced with white cracks, and some of the most photographed ice anywhere.

Lake Baikal facts: depth, age and size

Baikal is a giant in every dimension that counts:

• Depth: 1,642 m (5,387 ft), the deepest lake in the world.
• Age: about 25 million years, which makes it the oldest lake on the planet.
• Volume: about 23,600 km³, the largest freshwater lake by volume and roughly a fifth of the world’s unfrozen surface fresh water.
• Size: 636 km long, up to 79 km wide, with a surface area of 31,722 km².
• Rivers: as many as 330 flow in, but only one, the Angara, flows out, towards the Yenisei.
• Islands: 27, the largest being Olkhon, about 72 km long.

UNESCO inscribed Lake Baikal as a World Heritage Site in 1996, covering 3.15 million hectares. Its isolation has produced a remarkable freshwater ecosystem, with around a thousand aquatic species and the Baikal seal, or nerpa, a seal found nowhere else.

Baikal ice: cracks, blue slabs and clear surfaces

The lake usually freezes for four to five months, roughly January to May, and later in the north. Typical ice is 0.5 to 1.4 m thick, rising to more than 2 m where pressure ridges form. The photographs show the results: long white fractures running towards rock formations on the shore, broken blue slabs pushed up along the coast and stretches of ice so clear that cracks seem to hang in the water below.

The walkers in the frames, with boots, poles and gear, give a sense of how vast and empty the frozen surface is.

Visiting Lake Baikal in winter

Irkutsk is the usual base for a Baikal trip. The Trans-Siberian Railway, built between 1896 and 1902, brought the lake within reach of travellers, and its Circum-Baikal section needed around 200 bridges and 33 tunnels. In winter, Olkhon Island is reached on the only legal ice road on the lake, about 12 km long with a 10-tonne load limit. In 2015 that road was open from 17 February to 23 March, which shows how short the safe ice season can be.

Go with a local guide or an organised tour for any time on the ice: ice thickness varies from place to place, and cracks and open water appear even in deep winter.

Explore more: Lake Baikal used as a percussion setting; other winter waterscapes.

Related reading:

• Abraham Lake’s Ice Bubbles: Layers Beneath the Surface
• Lake Baikal Ice Percussion with irkDarbuka
• Kamchatka Snowbanks, Streets and Thaw: A Winter Photo Collection
• A Car Recovered from an Opening in Lake Ice
• Inside Kamchatka’s Mutnovsky Ice Cave
• Roadside Kindness in a Russian Video Compilation
• The 2013 Arctic Melt Pond Photograph: What the Camera Actually Showed

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