Is This The Oldest Lake In The World?

LAKE Ohrid formed millions of years ago, although exactly how many is a bone of contention.

The United Nations' Unesco organisation, which has declared the area a world heritage site, estimates the lake to be between two and three million years old.

But the American space agency Nasa puts the lake's age at between three and five million years, which to this non-scientifically trained brain seems quite a discrepancy.

Either way, Ohrid is old, much older than most lakes, whose age can be counted in thousands of years, rather than millions.

A main reason for a lifespan so short, geologically speaking, is that lakes tend to fill with sediment, chiefly soil but also dead plants and animals.

Unlike lakes created by glacial action, which have relatively shallow basins, Ohrid was formed by tectonic plate movements of the Earth's crust.

The result is Ohrid is unusually deep - almost 1,000ft in places - and, combined with a shoreline stretching almost 55 miles, contains about 13.3 cubic miles of water.

Continuing subsidence is apparently making the lake deeper, and anyway it receives little outside sediment as it is mainly fed by water flowing through soluble rocks.

Ohrid's great age and size have helped produce more than 200 endemic species, ie species naturally confined to this one lake.

Walking from Hotel Izgrev, the site of the world team senior championships, which start on Tuesday, to the nearby town of Struga takes in less than four miles of the lake's circumference, but there is plenty to see, as I hope the photos below and those in yesterday's post show.

Hardly endemic, but cormorants, gulls and coots joined me in enjoying the early-morning sun

New buildings along the lakeside make a sharp contrast with the old

Fishing used to be a main occupation in the lakeside's numerous villages, but has been largely overtaken by tourism

Many boats are now pleasure craft

Mountains form a constant backdrop, thanks to subsidence of the land the lake is on

The path to Struga is paved, making for easy walking even if the lake is sometimes naturally obscured from view

Much of the land beside the lake is flat, but there are occasional more-dramatic outcrops

So is Lake Ohrid the oldest lake in the world?

Almost certainly not - that honour is usually accorded to Lake Baikal in Siberia, although more recently Lake Zaysan in Kazakhstan has been put forward as even older at possibly 70 million years, which makes Lake Ohrid something of a baby on a world scale, even if it may be the oldest in Europe.