There is an amazing lake Elgygytgyn in Chukotka with crystal clear, unusually clear water. Translated from Chukchi, Elgygytgyn means “non-freezing lake”. This is an exaggeration, it freezes and only a couple of months a year is free of ice. Local residents consider the lake to be witchcraft and tell legends about it
From them you can learn that a shaman with an ice head once lived on the lake and that once a terrible fish was caught there, the vertebrae of which were almost human height … They also say that when strange northern mirages light up over the lake, people those who find themselves near him disappear without a trace. Recently, there have been rumors that a larger Loch Ness monster lives in the lake …
However, for serious scientists Elgygytgyn is a source of the most valuable scientific data. The first to describe the lake back in the 30s of the last century was the outstanding Soviet scientist Sergei Obruchev. In his works, this lake was called Elgydkhyn. This unique reservoir of its kind originated about 3.5–5 million years ago. Unlike the rest of Chukotka, Lake Elgygytgyn has never been glaciated, and therefore its bottom sediments are a real archive of paleoclimatic and biological information. But scientists have not yet looked into the depths of this reservoir.
The very origin of Elgygytgyn is a mystery. The lake has a perfectly round shape. At first, scientists believed that the basin of the reservoir is of volcanic origin. But in the 70s of the last century, after the appearance of space images, convincing evidence appeared that Lake Elgygytgyn was the result of a meteorite fall. Calculations were even carried out, indicating that the Elgygytgyn meteorite had a mass of 100-150 million tons, its diameter was 400 meters, and it crashed into the Earth at a speed of 15 kilometers per second.
The first instrumented expedition arrived at the lake in 1998. A Russian-German-American project was created to organize it. Scientists deployed radar work on the lake, conducted echo sounding and seismic studies. The first results exceeded all expectations. It turned out that there are about 200 meters of precipitation in the lake - shells, living microorganisms. This is a kind of record: there is no such amount of sediment in any lake in the Arctic. There are columns of precipitation two, ten, twenty meters long. And here - almost 200!
If the lake really was not subjected to glaciation, then the possibility of unknown relict organisms living in it cannot be ruled out, and then the legends of prehistoric monsters can be confirmed. True, scientists are still talking very cautiously on this topic, fearing that any reasoning about the "lake monsters" will immediately put an end to the planned serious research work. And Lake Elgygytgyn is capable of presenting any, the most unexpected surprises.
In order to conduct a full-fledged study of the lake, it is necessary to carry out deep drilling. The cost of such a research project is estimated at several million dollars. But the information that scientists will be able to obtain cannot be overestimated. Even if no monster is found in it (scientists especially do not hope to find the Chukchi Nessie in Elgygytgyn), they will be able to drill a well 550 meters deep and extract rock samples from the bottom of the lake. The cores raised with the help of special drilling platforms will need to be properly preserved so as not to introduce modern bacteria. Already now, the largest institutes of the planet hope to obtain deep lacustrine deposits for research.
This will reconstruct the change in flora and fauna in this region and, accordingly, judge the climate of the Arctic. The oldest Arctic soil, which is at the disposal of scientists today, is only 300 thousand years old. And if the Chukchi experiment is successful, then scientists will be able to reconstruct the history of the climate in this region of the Earth over a long period. It will be possible, for example, to test the hypothesis that Europe was a subtropical zone 3.5 million years ago.
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