The strangest lakes on earth

When it comes to a lake being “strange” there aren’t really many things that could actually make it out of the ordinary, but the following each have features that stand them well apart from the other approximately 117 million lakes on this planet.

Lake Baikal

Located in Eastern Russia within a huge Siberian mountain range lays the deepest freshwater lake in the world. Not only is it the deepest lake at 1,642m, but is also the largest in terms of freshwater volume, and because it’s so big, it’s managed to create its own biome and is home to various animals that can’t be found anywhere else in the world, like the Baikal oil fish pictured below.

The lake is so deep because it sits on the divide of a continental rift zone, an area of the planet where the two major tectonic plates that form that part of the earth are moving away from each other. Each year the bottom of the lake becomes around 1 inch wider and several inches deeper, adding to the already massive 31,722 km² lake’s surface area. An interesting tale about the lake comes from the Russian Civil War, when the losing force fled across the frozen lake during winter with all the gold they were trying to protect. At some point during the crossing, the ice broke and the gold wagons fell through the ice and down to the bottom of the lake, which still haven’t been found to this day.

Lake Karachay

(An old picture of the lake before it was filled in to protect the environment)

Situated in the southern Ural Mountains of central Russia sits the small and ridiculously radioactive lake Karachay. During the mid-20th century, every nation that had the ability started to research nuclear technology, and in doing so created a huge amount of radioactive waste they had no way to dispose of. One of the biggest nuclear researchers was Russia, and they decided to dump their nuclear waste in Lake Karachay starting in 1951 and continuing for at least 10 years. The lake is now considered to be the most radioactive open-air place on earth and has now been largely filled in to try and contain the radiation. During a drought in the 1960s, the lake almost completely dried out and the wind carried radioactive dust for miles, irradiating over half a million people. If you swam in the waters of the lake you would be dead within 24 hours.

Lake Natron

This 47 km long lake is located in northern Tanzania just south of the border with Kenya. It has a pH level so high that the water acts in the same way as a weak acid would, burning the skin and eyes of anything that isn’t adapted to it. Water normally has a pH level of between 6.5 and 8.5, but the water in the lake reaches as high as 10.5 which may not sound like much, but makes a huge difference. When water gets higher than 8.5 it can start to taste bitter due to the high levels of alkaline, but anything over a pH of 10 is caustic enough to slightly dissolve things.

Minerals from the surrounding hills flow into the lake which gives it a high salt and alkali content, and the natural springs it runs over increase the temperature in some parts to as high as 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit). The lake is most famous for its ability to calcify animals, a process that involves the animal being submerged in the water before coming out and drying off in the air. The water kills the animal but the high salt and alkali content preserve it and cause it to set firmly, leaving them in the pose they died in. The red color of the water isn’t quite so strange though, as it’s caused by a special type of algae that has adapted to the conditions of the lake.

Lake Vostok

(An ariel view of lake Vostok, the actual body of water sits 500m below the ice)

There are around 400 known sub-glacial lakes in Antarctica, but Lake Vostok is the largest of them and has given its name to Russia’s Vostok research station. The lake is about 250 km long and well over 600 meters deep, but the problem is that it is also 500 meters below the ice. Successful attempts have been made to drill down to the lake to gather samples of the water, and what they found was quite unusual. The temperature of the lake averages around -3 °C but it remains liquid due to the pressure on the water which keeps it from freezing and gives it the potential to support life. One of the scarier facts about the lake is that life there has developed independently from the outside world for millions of years, which means the possibility for unknown types of bacteria to evolve for millennia with the ability to infect someone is very real, with the big question being what’ll happen when someone exposes the lake to the surface and manages to go down there to take a look.