{"id":14593,"date":"2015-11-20T08:50:49","date_gmt":"2015-11-20T13:50:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14593"},"modified":"2015-11-20T08:50:49","modified_gmt":"2015-11-20T13:50:49","slug":"on-thin-ice-big-northern-lakes-are-being-rapidly-transformed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=14593","title":{"rendered":"On Thin Ice: Big Northern Lakes Are Being Rapidly Transformed"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thin Ice: Big Northern Lakes\u00a0Are Being Rapidly Transformed<\/a><\/h3>\n

As temperatures rise, the world\u2019s iconic northern lakes are undergoing major changes that include swiftly warming waters, diminished ice cover, and outbreaks of harmful algae. Now, a global consortium of scientists is trying to assess the toll.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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For more than 25 million years,\u00a0Lake Baikal<\/a>\u00a0has cut an immense arc from southern Siberia to the Mongolian border. The length of Florida and nearly the depth of the Grand Canyon, Baikal is the deepest, largest in volume, and most ancient freshwater lake in the world, holding one-fifth of the planet\u2019s above-ground drinking supply. It\u2019s a Noah\u2019s Ark of biodiversity, home to myriad species found nowhere else on earth. It\u2019s also changing\u00a0fast, due to heat-trapping greenhouse gases that are increasingly disrupting the climate.<\/p>\n

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Pavelblazek\/Wikimedia Commons<\/div>\n
Lake Baikal in March. Records show that Baikal\u2019s ice season is growing shorter and its ice thinning.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Baikal\u2019s surface waters are warming at an accelerating pace, rising at least 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) over the past quarter century \u2014 twice as fast as global air temperatures, new research shows. The ice season, which typically covered the lake from January through May, has been shortened by nearly\u00a0three weeks since the mid-1800s,<\/a>\u00a0and the ice has thinned nearly 5 inches since 1949. By the end of the century, scientists say that Baikal could be ice-free a month or more longer than today.<\/p>\n

This rapidly changing climate threatens the lake\u2019s unique, cold-adapted creatures, including the iconic\u00a0nerpa<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 the world\u2019s only true freshwater seal \u2014 whose fertility drops in warmer winters. Fishermen complain that the\u00a0omul<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 a once-bountiful species of whitefish \u2014 has already grown scarce. Rising temperatures may also factor into some mysterious new problems plaguing the lake in the past few years. The brilliant green underwater forests of endemic Baikal sponges are dying, victims of an unknown pathogen. And dense algal mats choke wide swaths of bottom near shore.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Thin Ice: Big Northern Lakes\u00a0Are Being Rapidly Transformed As temperatures rise, the world\u2019s iconic northern lakes are undergoing major changes that include swiftly warming waters, diminished ice cover, and outbreaks of harmful algae. Now, a global consortium of scientists is trying to assess the toll.\u00a0 For more than 25 million years,\u00a0Lake Baikal\u00a0has cut an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[141,369,2199,10682,10681,7163],"class_list":["post-14593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-global-warming","tag-ice","tag-lake-bail","tag-northern-lakes","tag-yale-environment-360"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14594,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14593\/revisions\/14594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}