Bears in the Streets by Lisa Dickey

Author:Lisa Dickey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

(L-R) Me, Tanya Sitnikova, Natasha Maximova, and Yura Alekseev on the deck of the Merlin, 2015 (PHOTO BY LISA DICKEY)

We watched as the three divers leapt into the water, then tracked their movements through their bright yellow tanks and the clouds of bubbles ascending to the surface. I found myself pondering Vladimir Votyagov’s death, wondering whether, if the truck had driven a yard or two on either side of that thin ice, it wouldn’t have plunged through. One never knew whom fate would touch with tragedy, a fact that seems especially clear when you drop in on people only once every ten years. The thought made me melancholy.

At long last, the divers returned to the boat, their lips blue from the chilly waters. They hoisted up buckets full of rocks, which Tanya and Natasha began picking through with tweezers, in a scene exactly the same as those I’d witnessed 20 years earlier. The scientists’ work had changed little, but the state of the lake had changed a great deal, according to Skinny Igor. Baikal, he said, was experiencing a “genuine ecological crisis.”

He explained that around 2008, divers and researchers started to notice that the lakebed was changing. “We weren’t even sure yet if it was a problem,” he said. “But by 2010, it was impossible not to notice that something was wrong.”

“What had changed?” I asked him.

“I’ll show you,” he said. Igor often carried an underwater camera on his dives, and he opened his laptop to show me videos he’d shot. First, he showed me healthy sponges from a few years back. They were green, plump, and plentiful, creating a lush underwater forest of vegetation. Then, he showed me how they looked today.

The difference was startling: these sponges were brown, scarred, and disintegrating. Many lay dead on the lake floor. Others were completely covered in some kind of grassy material, smothered by heavy strands that swayed gently in the water.

The death of so many sponges, Igor told me, was a looming disaster, because sponges provide filtration for the lake. “They are crucial to the health of the lake,” he said, “but they are dying. There are places where more than 80 percent of the sponges have died.”

The scientists didn’t know why they were dying, though some suspected that blue-green algae was the cause. “It must have a connection,” Igor said, “but it’s still not completely clear why.” Another possibility was human interference with the lake. “Consider this,” he went on. “It’s not happening everywhere along the lake, so it can’t be global warming. Global warming isn’t selective like that. No, it’s happening specifically where there are more tourists.”

So far, he said, “We don’t know what exactly the cause is. There are many possible factors.” Since they didn’t know what was killing the sponges, they couldn’t act to halt the process. And even if they could, the damage was already catastrophic.

“Healthy sponges grow at a rate of 9 to 11 millimeters per year,” Igor told me. “Larger sponges can be 1.5 meters long, and the biggest are even taller than I am.

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