----- Original Message -----
From: "Alex Morgan" <alexm at seattleaudubon.org>
To: <sasaction at onenw.org>
Sent: Friday, April 07, 2006 11:29 AM
Subject: [sasaction] ACTION: Protect Lake Baikal
-
===== A message from the sasaction mailing list =====
-
>From a friend of Seattle Audubon:
Dear friends,
My name is Andrey Varlamov. I am an intern at Seattle Audubon and a
Hubert Humphrey Fellow at the University of Washington. I am writing to
ask your quick help in protecting a very important area for birds and
wildlife near my home.
Lake Baikal - the largest and deepest freshwater lake in the world - is
being threatened by the construction of an oil pipeline. The lake is
identified as a World Heritage Site and is incredibly important for
animal and plant life. The lake hosts 1085 species of plants and 1550
species of animals. Over 60% of these animal species are endemic - for
example of the 52 species of fish, 27 are endemic.
Please give your support to stop the oil pipeline construction next to
Lake Baikal! This might be our last chance to stop a proposal to build
an oil pipeline through the Lake Baikal basin. The completed pipeline
would come within one kilometer of the lake and cross 10 major rivers
that flow into the lake. In very dubious circumstances, the state
organization responsible for carrying out environmental impact
assessments has approved the project sponsored by the state oil pipeline
monopoly, "Transneft."
It is likely that only the intervention of the Russian President,
Vladimir Putin, can prevent the project from going ahead at this time.
Thousands of signatures have been collected opposing the project via the
Internet, and thousands more have been collected in the Irkutsk region
in a petition for President Putin to call off the project. In the event
of an accident (as was recently witnessed in Alaska) up to 40,000 tons
of oil could enter the lake within one half hour. Additionally, the area
is one of the most seismically active in Siberia, with major earthquakes
occurring throughout history in the region.
Please link to this website and take action -
http://www.babr.ru/?pt=truba
Your voice (and online vote) can help protect Lake Baikal. All online
signatures will be transferred to President Putin of Russia. The
organization in charge of the petition has already collected over 20,000
signatures, but your voice is needed! Please, make your voice heard for
the protection of Lake Baikal!
Please, send this letter to your friends and colleagues!
Thank you,
Andrey Varlamov
Hubert Humphrey Fellow
The Evans School of Public Affairs
University of Washington
Seattle
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lake Baikal Lake Baikal is the largest (by volume), deepest and oldest
freshwater lake in the world. A designated World Heritage Site, the lake
lies in Southern Siberia in Russia, between Irkutsk Oblast to the
northwest and Buryatia to the southeast, near the city of Irkutsk. The
name derives from Tatar "Bai-Kul" - "rich lake". In Russian, it is
traditionally called a sea, and in the Buryat and Mongol languages it is
called Dalai-Nor, or "Sacred Sea". Baikal has as much water as all of
North America's Great Lakes combined - about 20% of the total fresh
water on the Earth.
Known as the "Galapagos of Russia", its age and isolation have produced
one of the world’s richest and most unusual freshwater faunas,
which is of exceptional value to evolutionary science. At 636 km long
and 80 km wide, Baikal has the largest surface area of any freshwater
lake in Asia (31,494 sq. km) and is the deepest lake in the world (1637
meters, previously measured at 1620 meters). The bottom of the lake is
1285 meters below sea level, but below this lies some 7 km (4 miles) of
sediment, placing the rift floor some 8-9 km (more than 5 miles) down:
the deepest continental rift on Earth. In geological terms, the rift is
young and active - it widens about 2 centimeters per year. The fault
zone is also seismically active: there are hot springs in the area and
notable earthquakes every few years. Its age is estimated at 25-30
million years, making it one of the most ancient lakes in geological
history. It is unique among large, high-latitude lakes in that its
sediments have not been scoured by overriding continental ice sheets.
U.S. and Russian studies of sediment cores in the 1990s provide a
detailed record of climatic variation over the past 250,000 years.
Longer and deeper sediment cores are expected
in the near future. If all the sediments were scoured from the lake, it
would be approximately 9 km deep. The lake is completely surrounded by
mountains, technically protected as a national park and contains 22
small islands, the largest - Olkhon - being 72 km long. The lake is fed
by some 300 inflowing rivers - the six main ones being Selenga, the
source of some of Baikal's pollution, Chikoy, Khiloh, Uda, Barguzin and
Upper Angara. The lake is drained through a single outlet, the Angara
River. The extent of biodiversity present in Lake Baikal is equalled by
few other lakes in the world. As many as 852 species and 233 varieties
of algae and 1550 species and varieties of animals inhabit the lake;
many of them are endemic species. The world-famous Baikal Seal (Phoca
sibirica) - the only mammal living in the lake - is found throughout the
whole area of the lake. Baikal is renowned for the unique clarity of its
waters.
Muted protest about the establishment of a wood pulp and cellulose plant
at the south end of the lake in 1957 initialized ecological awareness
among educated Russians, though not among the Soviet bureaucracy.
However, the plant still pours industrial effluent into Baikal's waters.
The overall impacts of watershed pollution on Baikal and similar
watersheds is studied annually by the Tahoe Baikal Institute, an
exchange program between the U.S., Russian and Mongolian scientists and
university graduate students started in 1989. Of note is an endemic
subspecies of the omul fish (Coregonus autumnalis migratorius), which is
fished, smoked, and sold on all markets around the lake. For many
travelers on the Trans-Siberian railway, purchasing smoked omul is one
of the highlights on the long journey.
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