SCENES FROM SCIENCE
Greenness of Baikal
THE editor of Nature has been writing about a scientific conference he went to on the shores of Lake Baikal — 'breath- taking in its audacity', he calls the project which was being dreamed uP there; the founding of an international research centre of magnitude and scope previously unequalled in its kind; and, situated in the depths of the SoViet Union, entirely open to foreign resear- chers and possibly having a foreign scientist as director! The Russians are showing two passionate concerns; one for preserving the Lake in as near to a green condition as possible, the other for seeing that it adds the maximum amount to scientific knowledge.
Baikal is one of the world's wonders, a huge inland sea in far Mongolia, probably holding as much as one fifth of the total, fresh water on the Earth's surface. Until recently it had been too remote for its condition to be assessed with real certainty — I remember read- ing some years ago that the waters were already polluted, chiefly by paper-mills round the shore, paper-mills being par- ticularly active pollutants. Not so. The news from the conference is that the waters are in their more or less unspoilt original condition. The Russians have a Limnological Institute at Irkutsk, the main city on the shore, where prelimin- ary work is already under way. ('Lim- nology' — the study of fresh waters and their inhabitants.)
The Lake is 430 miles long and is wonderfully inhabited by flora and fauna of all kinds in immense numbers, the faunas including 20,000 seals adapted to life there all the year round. That makes a beginning on the obvious facts; additionally there's a vast amount of underlying material which is a puzzle; the geological history of the lake would need a profound seismic survey to elucidate it. And possibly natural re- cords may enable a climatological his- tory to be mapped.
So we come to the plan for the research centre. Here again the Rus- sians aim at something radical and daring; not only a research centre inhabited by international teams of scientists, but one whose programmes will be directed by the researchers, not by 'other interests' — such as govern- ments or market forces. Several repre- sentative international research groups have signed their names, Canadian, American, Swedish, Belgian, German, Chinese, and our own Royal Society. One must wish them well.
William Cooper
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