Lake Baikal Warming Faster Than Atmosphere, Researchers Find - 2.16F Since 1946 - Bloomberg

[hatrack]

April 30 (Bloomberg) -- The world's largest lake is warming faster than the atmosphere, challenging the idea that large bodies of water can withstand global warming, according to U.S. and Russian scientists.

Siberia's Lake Baikal, which holds 20 percent of the world's fresh water, has warmed by 1.21 degrees Celsius (2.16 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1946, said Marianne Moore, assistant professor of biological sciences at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Global temperatures have risen 0.76 degrees Celsius since industrialization, a UN panel on climate change said in March.

The lake holds more than 2,500 plant and animal species, including the world's only exclusively freshwater seal, and some could become extinct by continued warming, said Moore, co-author of a report on Lake Baikal to be published in May in the journal Global Change Biology. The study challenges the idea that thermal inertia of oceans, seas and large lakes would make them more resistant to climate change, Moore said.

``The warming that we're seeing in this lake is of more concern than that of any other lake because of the extraordinary biodiversity,'' Moore said in an interview. ``You could potentially lose the Baikal seal.''

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=aZ4dLJ4xTeSQ&refer=home

[Strelnikov_]

1. Bye little Nerpa

[jpak]

2. Lake Baikal is my dream ecotourist destination

It's a world treasure - full of unique freshwater sponges (with symbiotic algae), seals, fish and birds.

I'd love to spend a summer there diving and checking critters off the life list...

[phantom power]

3. Last Chance To See.

[DFW]

4. 20% of the world's fresh water is a staggering number

A friend of mine was chief correspondent for West German radio news
in Russia, and has visited Baikal. Already the magnitude of the pollution
there (and lack of any government will to do much about it--sound familiar?)
is doing unimaginable damage, and if it warms up to the point where its
ecosystem is damaged permanently, the pollution will kill it off altogether.