Author(s)

Olga V. Poliakova, Albert T. Lebedev, Nadezhda K.Karakhanova, Valery A.Shmorgunov, Anatoly V. Funtov, Valery S. Petrosyan

Abstract

Lake Baikal is the deepest and oldest freshwater lake in the world. It contains 20% of the world's resource of fresh water (23 000 km3), more than all five of the North American Great Lakes together. Its unusual size (700 km long,20-40 km wide and 1600m deep) makes evaluation of its state of health particularly difficult. In the last twenty years potential pollution of the lake has caused controversy not only in Russia but throughout the world. To study the present state of its contamination with organic pollutants the samples of water, snow, sediments, phytoplankton, zooplankton, sponges, plants, algae, fish, eggs of birds and blubber of seals w

Keywords