Ice swimmer and blogger Yegor Lesnoi is in the middle

Lake Baikal is the planet’s oldest and deepest lake exist

A New Year’s tree on the bottom of Lake Baikal?

Nothing seemed impossible for a trio of Russian ice swimming enthusiasts who put up an artificial fir tree on the bottom of the world’s deepest lake to celebrate the country’s holiday in 2019.

Instead of wetsuits and scuba diving gear, the trio wore just festive trunks and socks and Santa hats as they performed a brief underwater dance routine around the tree.

“We wanted to congratulate people with the upcoming New Year’s holidays,” 27-year-old ice swimmer and blogger Yegor Lesnoi said.

Nothing seemed impossible for a trio of Russian ice swimming enthusiasts who put up an artificial fir tree on the bottom of the world’s deepest lake to celebrate the country’s holiday in 2019.

Instead of wetsuits and scuba diving gear, the trio wore just festive trunks and socks and Santa hats as they performed a brief underwater dance routine around the tree.

“We wanted to congratulate people with the upcoming New Year’s holidays,” 27-year-old ice swimmer and blogger Yegor Lesnoi said.

The mission near the village of Sarma was “both challenging and interesting,” he said.

The tree was installed near the shore, at the depth of some three meters, after the swimmers cut a hole in the thick ice.
They said the water temperature of just above 0 degrees Celsius and an icy wind did not deter them.

But even though the men have several years of experience this week’s dive was particularly difficult because they had to swim under the ice, Lesnoi said.

The men said they also wanted to promote clean living.

“After the swim, the plastic green beauty was lifted up to the surface so as not to pollute Lake Baikal,” said Sergei Smetankin, who helped organize the dive.

Lesnoi is now making up for a lost time, free-diving in Baikal and hauling out tonnes of tires that have accumulated close to the banks of a lake that holds one-fifth of the world’s unfrozen fresh water, and more than all of North America’s Great Lakes combined.

“I started about three years ago and now I do it several times a year,” Lesnoi says in Irkutsk, the city where he now lives, about 70km from Baikal.

“A friend pulls me along slowly behind his jet-ski, I spot the tires and free-dive down to perhaps 5 meters, attach a rope and he hauls them ashore. This year we’ve cleared about 4½ tonnes from Baikal,” he adds, explaining that the tires fell from the sides of boats, docks, and piers where they were used as buffers.

“We’ve also removed tires from the Irkutsk reservoir and other places in the region. We’ve probably cleared 400 tonnes in total, and taken them to a factory that turns them into safe matting for playgrounds and sports facilities.”

Experts say Baikal now faces far more serious threats than decades’ worth of decaying rubber: swathes of illegal building work, surging tourist numbers that are overwhelming local infrastructure, and the specter of a potential disaster involving 6.5 million tonnes of toxic waste stored in ponds near the shoreline.

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