Lake Baikal
— — the deepest still water on the planet.
Not only on a wall.
“The oldest lake on Earth, and the deepest. A crescent of clear water held between mountains in southern Siberia, fed by more than three hundred rivers and drained by one. In late winter the ice goes turquoise and cracks ring like distant gunfire. In summer the village of Listvyanka smells of smoked omul on cedar boards. The Buryat call it the sacred sea. Nobody who has stood on the shore argues with the name. from the studio
Lake Baikal, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Lake Baikal lies in a rift valley in southern Siberia, between Irkutsk Oblast and the Republic of Buryatia, about 70 kilometres north of the Mongolian border. It holds roughly 23,600 cubic kilometres of fresh water — close to a quarter of the world's unfrozen surface freshwater — and reaches 1,642 metres at its deepest point, the deepest of any lake on Earth. The basin is at least 25 million years old, making Baikal the oldest lake by a wide margin. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1996.
The water is famous for clarity — divers report visibility of about 40 metres in spring before the plankton bloom. That clarity comes partly from Epischura baikalensis, a tiny endemic crustacean that filters the upper water column almost continuously. Around 1,700 plant and animal species live here, roughly two-thirds of them found nowhere else, including the nerpa, the world's only freshwater seal. The lake is fed by 336 inflows and drained by a single river, the Angara, which leaves at Listvyanka and runs west toward the Yenisey.
Baikal freezes solid from January through May. Once the ice thickens past about 70 centimetres, locals drive small cars across it, and crews from Listvyanka cut tracks toward Olkhon Island. The most photographed period is February to mid-March, when the ice turns translucent turquoise and pressure ridges shatter into glassy stacks. Summers are short and warm — the southern shore reaches the high teens Celsius — and the omul fishery on the Selenga delta opens. Autumn brings storms locals call the Sarma, named for the gorge they funnel through.