Excerpted from The Edge of Physics by Anil Ananthaswamy, copyright © 2010. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. All rights reserved.
About 25 million years ago, Earth parted in the southeast corner of Siberia. Since then, countless rivers have converged on the gaping continental rift, creating the vast body of water known as Lake Baikal. Surrounded by mountains, this 400-mile-long inland sea has remained isolated from other lakes and oceans, leading to the evolution of unusual flora and fauna, more than three-quarters of which are found nowhere else on the planet. Russians regard it as their own Galápagos. The lake contains 20 percent of the world’s unfrozen freshwater—or just a little less during the severe Siberian winter when, despite its enormous size and depth, Baikal freezes over.
On one such winter’s day, I found myself on the lake near the town of Listvyanka, which is nestled in a crook of the shoreline. I was in an old van that was trying to head west, not along a coastal road—for there was none—but over the ice. The path, however, was blocked by a ridge. It looked like a tectonic fault: Two sections of the lake’s solid surface had slammed together and splintered, throwing up jagged chunks of ice. The driver, a Russian with a weather-beaten face, peered from underneath his peaked cap, looking for a break in the ridge. When he spied a few feet of smooth ice, he got out and prodded it with a metal rod, only to shake his head as it crumbled: not thick enough to support the van. We kept driving south, farther and farther from shore, in what I was convinced was the wrong direction. The van shuddered and lurched, its tires crunching on patches of fresh snow and occasionally slithering on ice. The ridge continued as far as the eye could see. Suddenly we stopped. In front of us was a dangerous-looking expanse littered with enormous pieces of ice that rose from the lake’s frozen surface like giant shards of broken glass.
The driver seemed to be contemplating going around them to look for thick ice that would let us reach our destination, an underwater observatory operating in one of the deepest parts of the lake. But if he did that, we’d get even farther from the shore, and it would take just one punctured tire to strand us. The sun was little more than an hour from setting, and the temperature was falling. I couldn’t ask the driver if he had a radio or a phone to call for help, since he did not speak a word of English and the only Russian phrase I knew was do svidaniya. The last thing I wanted to say to him at this point was “Good-bye.”
