Qualla: West Siberian Glacial Lake

West Siberian Glacial Lake: Introduction

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Brocken Inaglory, CC BY-SA 4.0. Beneath the West Siberian Plain, under the rivers and wetlands and permafrost, lies the memory of something enormous. Eighty thousand years ago, this flat expanse held one of the largest lakes in Earth's history — a periglacial sea more than twice the size of the present-day Caspian. It is gone now, drained into geology and sediment, but the West Siberian Glacial Lake left its mark on the continent's hydrology in ways that still echo today.

Image: Brocken Inaglory | CC BY-SA 4.0

West Siberian Glacial Lake: The Ice Sheet That Built a Sea

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Buaidh, CC BY-SA 4.0. During the Weichselian Glaciation, approximately 80,000 years ago, the Barents-Kara Ice Sheet advanced southward and blocked the Arctic Ocean outlets of two of the world's great river systems: the Ob and the Yenisei. With nowhere to go, their waters backed up across the West Sibe...

Image: Buaidh | CC BY-SA 4.0

West Siberian Glacial Lake: A River That Ran to the Mediterranean

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. What happened to the water when the lake could hold no more is one of the more remarkable theories in Quaternary geology. Because drainage north to the Arctic was blocked by ice, the lake's overflow had to find another route. Scientists theorize that water spilled southward and w...

Image: Public domain

West Siberian Glacial Lake: What the Lake Left Behind

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Žiga, CC0. The West Siberian Plain today is one of the flattest and wettest places on Earth — a vast mosaic of bogs, rivers, and waterlogged terrain that covers an area roughly the size of Western Europe. Much of this character owes something to the glacial lake that once covered it. The la...

Image: Žiga | CC0

West Siberian Glacial Lake: Reading the Invisible

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Žiga, CC0. The West Siberian Glacial Lake is invisible now. Flying over Siberia at altitude, you see rivers threading through forest and tundra, vast wetlands shimmering in summer, ice patterns in winter. There is no shoreline, no obvious scar in the landscape to mark where a sea once stood...

Image: Žiga | CC0