Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History

The unexpected diversity, beauty, and strangeness of life in ancient lakes—some millions of years old—and the remarkable insights the lakes are yielding about the causes of biodiversity.

Most lakes are less than 10,000 years old and short-lived, but there is a much smaller number of ancient lakes, tectonic in origin and often millions of years old, that are scattered across every continent but Antarctica: Baikal, Tanganyika, Victoria, Titicaca, and Biwa, to name a few. Often these lakes are ...