Daily Times (Pakistan)

Monday, May 05, 2008

<http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008%5C05%5C05%5Cstory_5-5-2008_pg6_24>

World's largest lake warming rapidly

Siberia's Lake Baikal has warmed faster than global air temperatures

over the past 60 years, which could put animals unique to the world's

largest lake in jeopardy, US and Russian scientists said.

The lake has warmed 1.21 degrees Celsius (2.18 degrees Fahrenheit)

since 1946 due to climate change, almost three times faster than

global air temperatures, according to a paper by the scientists to be

published next month in the journal 'Global Change Biology.' "The

whole food web could shift," Marianne Moore, a biology professor at

Wellesley College in Massachusetts and one of the authors of the

paper, said in an interview. The frigid lake, which holds 20 percent

of the world's freshwater, boasts 2,500 species, most of them found

nowhere else, such as the world's only exclusively freshwater seal.

In potentially bad news for that animal, the paper found that the

lake's annual days of ice cover had fallen an average of 18 days over

the last 100 years and could drop two weeks to two months more by the

end of the century.

The findings could foreshadow the vulnerability of smaller lakes to

global warming because Baikal's great volume of water had been

thought to protect it from rising temperatures, the paper said.

reuters

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