Ikigai Daily
WonderNature fact1,295 of 1,961

Lake Baikal is the world's oldest and deepest freshwater lake.

Ikigai Daily

ScienceNature

Why it matters

The idea in context

This Siberian rift lake is around 25 million years old and holds a huge share of Earth's unfrozen freshwater. It is less a lake than a living geological archive, with species and sediments that preserve deep time.

Türkçe

Aynı kart, başka bir dilde.

Baykal Gölü, dünyanın en eski ve en derin tatlı su gölüdür.

Sibirya'daki bu rift gölü yaklaşık 25 milyon yıllıktır ve Dünya'nın donmamış tatlı suyunun büyük bir kısmını barındırır. Bir gölden çok, yaşayan bir jeolojik arşiv gibidir; canlıları ve tortuları derin zamanı saklar.

Source trail

Read beyond the card.

UNESCO Lake Baikal.

Background reading: Lake BaikalAttribution and context are revised when stronger evidence appears. Corrections are welcome through the editorial page.
Open in the iPhone appEditorial method

Related cards

These cards share a subject or mode with the one above. The route is editorial, not personalised.

Q1314
WonderScience

There are more trees on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way.

A landmark 2015 study combining hundreds of thousands of ground surveys with satellite data put Earth's tree count at about 3 trillion. Our galaxy holds an estimated 100 to 400 billion stars — so trees outnumber them several times over. The same study carried a sting: humans have roughly halved the world's trees since farming began.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Q1315
WonderScience

The horseshoe crab has blue blood so sensitive to contamination that it is used to keep vaccines safe.

Horseshoe crab blood is blue because it carries oxygen with copper rather than iron. It also contains cells that clot instantly around bacterial toxins — so reliably that, since the 1970s, an extract called LAL has been the standard test ensuring vaccines, IV drugs and implants are free of contamination. Nearly every injectable medicine has, in effect, been checked by a creature older than the dinosaurs.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Q1320
WonderScience

In Utah, a forest of about 47,000 aspen trunks is actually a single organism sharing one root system.

Named Pando ('I spread' in Latin), this grove of quaking aspens looks like thousands of separate trees, but every trunk is a genetically identical clone growing from one vast underground root network. Weighing an estimated 6,000 tonnes (6,600 short tons), it is among the heaviest known living things — and possibly one of the oldest, with estimates running to thousands of years. It is, in a real sense, a single life pretending to be a forest.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Q1324
WonderScience

Wombats are the only known animals that produce cube-shaped droppings.

These burrowing Australian marsupials leave behind little cubes — up to a hundred a night — and scientists spent years puzzling over how. A 2019 study found the answer in the wombat's long intestine, whose walls stretch unevenly, moulding soft waste into flat-sided blocks before it dries. The likely purpose is practical: cubes don't roll away, so a wombat can stack them to mark its territory.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Q1325
WonderScience

Flamingos are not born pink — they turn pink from what they eat.

Flamingo chicks hatch grey. Their famous colour comes from pigments called carotenoids in the algae and small shellfish they filter from the water — the same family of compounds that makes carrots orange. A flamingo's diet quite literally shows on its feathers, and a captive bird fed the wrong food will slowly fade to white. You are, in the plainest sense, coloured by what you consume.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Next in the open archiveSome bristlecone pines are older than the Great Pyramid.Q1347