'Worrisome and even frightening': Ancient ecosystem of Lake Baikal at risk of regime change from warming

Lake Baikal, in southern Siberia, is the world's oldest and deepest freshwater lake and, due to its age and isolation, is exceptionally biodiverse — but this remarkable ecosystem is under threat from global warming. In this excerpt from Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History , Jeffrey McKinnon examines the regime shift that is now taking place at the lake.

In the first major report presenting comprehensive analyses of the data collected by the Kozhov family, Stephanie Hampton, of the U.S. National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis , Izmest'eva and a team of collaborators from multiple institutions reported on the biological changes that had accompanied the warming of Baikal.

Related: 'Hunter-gatherers must have gazed in horror' — What would Toba's supereruption have been like for our ancient relatives? Baikal, with sunlight penetrating its clear winter ice, has traditionally had a peak in algae productivity in the winter and early spring — yet another unusual feature of this system. In the late 20th century, these peaks were often delayed, weaker, or simply absent. The Kozhov family's data detected these patterns, which can seldom be evaluated in lakes, because of their determined sampling through the winters.

It indicates that global warming and other human-generated environmental changes may sometimes cause abrupt shifts in ecosystems that may be hard to both predict and reverse. Yet it only assumed its current deep and thoroughly oxygenated character in the late Pleistocene . Among its diverse endemic fauna, its gammarid amphipods and sculpins are especially well studied. Species from both radiations are uncharacteristically important in open water food chains and also as prey for the planet's only species of freshwater seal, the nerpa .

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