Lake Baikal Winter Ice Art — Siberia Russia

About this spectacle

Standing on Lake Baikal's winter ice is one of the most visually arresting experiences in the natural world. The ice is exceptionally transparent — in shallow nearshore areas you can see the lake floor through over a metre of clear ice beneath your feet, as though standing on glass above an abyss. Where pressures have buckled the surface, ridges of fractured ice rise two to three metres high, their facets catching the low January sun in shards of turquoise, cobalt, and pure white, running in jagged lines that stretch for kilometres. Cracks propagate across the surface with sharp rifle-shot sounds, and cave-like hummocks glow from within when backlit. The colours shift hour by hour: sunrise turns the translucent ice amber and rose before midday cold sharpens it back to deep blue. From February into March, Baikal nerpas — the world's only exclusively freshwater seal — haul out onto the ice, their dark forms dotting an otherwise crystalline, wind-scoured plain. The scale is immense and the silence, occasionally broken by the groan and crack of thermal movement, is profound.

When to go

Jan — May, peak Jan — Mar

Getting there

Nearest airport: IKT. Nearest city: Irkutsk.

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