| Summary: | Siberia is huge, but it isn’t greedy. Of all the colors in the universe’s paint box, it asks for only a few shades of green to have its massive portrait painted. The picture starts with a ragged band of soft sage, the treeless tundra of the Arctic and subarctic. Through the middle, a thick swath of deep emerald, the taiga forest that stretches from the Pacific to the Urals and beyond to Scandinavia. Finally, in the far lower left corner, a wedge of soft yellowish green, Siberia’s share of the fertile Eurasian steppe. From a distance, this rough canvas is a study in chlorophyll, with just a single, stark break in the color scheme—a thin blue crescent slicing through the lower middle of the emerald taiga. It’s almost as if the same gigantic hand that wielded the paintbrush then picked up a monstrous stiletto and in an impulsive Dadaist gesture cut a gigantic gash into the taut canvas, which pulled open and filled up with cobalt paint. And I suppose if you believed in such things, you could say that’s actually what’s happened here, that the hand was God’s and that after the earth was sliced open, the gash grew ever wider and filled up with more and more blue water. Earth’s surface has been torn apart here, and water has been flowing into the gash for eons. A lake is a simple thing, really—just a big hole in the ground filled with water. And our restless planet finds all kinds of ways to make them. The earth is constantly reshaping itself, through processes great and small—from the epochal smashing and tearing of crustal plates, to the periodic growth and recession of glaciers, to the daily flow of wind, water, and sediment. As long as water flows and the earth moves, lakes will continue to be born, grow, and die. Lakes can be formed in the buckling and cracking seams between the earth’s tectonic plates, as with the Great Lakes of East Africa. They can be formed in the wake of receding glaciers, which leave long grooves, moraines, and kettle holes.
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