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When I was writing about Irkutsk oblast earlier this month, I noted that the region includes Lake Baikal, the world’s largest and deepest lake. This lake has so captured the world’s imagination that there are more than 10,000 images tagged with “Baikal” on Flickr.com.
Unfortunately, however, Lake Baikal has also captured its share of pollution, and the environmental threat to the lake is chronicled in a new book, “Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal” (Oxford University Press).
Its author, Peter Thomson, is an environmental journalist. Some of you may have caught his work on National Public Radio’s Living on Earth programs. According to the publicity for the book, Thomson’s journey to Lake Baikal began as a way of healing his spirit after divorce. What he discovered when he got there was an ecosystem in need of healing.
Most people around the world and in Russia–and that apparently includes some scientists–believe that Lake Baikal cleans itself of all contaminants. The lake is home to an odd miniature shrimp, which sort of vacuums the lake. But what Thomson finds is that pollution from factories, farms and encroaching humans is testing the shrimps’ power. Bratsk, a city that is in the Irkutsk region, was recently named to the Blacksmith Institute’s “dirty 30″ polluted spots in the world. Angarsk, another city in the region that is the site of a giant petrochemical complex, was cited by the then Soviet government for its air pollution way back in 1988.
There’s one other problem with these tiny shrimp: Other animals eat them, and so the pollution gets passed up the region’s food chain, from fish and a native freshwater seal to birds of prey, bears and humans. And because of something called biomagnification, the pollution gets more concentrated as it goes up the food chain.
Sounds like Thomson’s book is interesting food for thought.
Image, credit: Lake Baikal by Chach Coati
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