![Sample our Engineering & Technology journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5933/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Engineering-Tech.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater reservoir on Earth (~600 × 30 km in size and up to 1.6 km in depth), has more than 300 contributing rivers but only one N-trending outflow – River Angara. In the Pliocene or Pleistocene, another N-trending outflow operated through the Palaeo-Manzurka to Lena. Provenance analysis using U–Pb dating of detrital zircons from the Palaeo-Manzurka sediments demonstrates that the dominant source of the zircons was the lake deposits, while the contribution of zircons from local bedrocks was limited to about 8% only. Looking for an explanation of this, we propose a hypothesis that formation of the Palaeo-Manzurka sediments took place in association with a catastrophic mega-landslide (~15 × 3 km) into the lake and the resulting mega-tsunami flooding.
Acknowledgements
We thank Kuo-Lung Wang for the logistics of the work under a collaboration project between Taiwan (NSC) and Russia (SB RAS) №7. Oleg V. Khlystov kindly provided and useful comments, though he declined to co-author the paper because of different interpretations on the formation of underwater topography near Goloustnaya. Wally Bothner, University of New Hampshire, helped with English usage and provided useful comments on the earlier version of the paper. Valeriy Puljevskiy kindly provided a photograph of the Lena formation. The article benefited from comprehensive reviews by Martin Margold (Durham University) and Alan Gillespie (University of Washington).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Supplemental data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00206814.2015.1064329.