Man Skates Over Frozen Waters of World’s Deepest Lake — Then He Heard a Chilling Sound From Below

The chilled breeze of winter arrives, carrying a cacophony of sound effects. From echoes of humpback whale songs to the rustling trees of aspen and poplar, a suite of melodies waft in the air. In Russia, when the winter winds sweep above Lake Baikal, the crystal aquamarine water below freezes into a glassy sheet of ice. Between January and April each year, the pristine lake wears an icy veil that can be up to 6.5 feet thick. Flanked by mountains where mobs of deer roam and feed, the lake turns into a colossal skating rink, where thousands, if not millions, of people come to skate, snowmobile, and explore ice caves.

When Siberian photographer Alexey Kolganov (@alex.kolgan) visited the lake in the winter of 2021, he was flabbergasted. The ice below his skating flippers was singing, not some beautiful nature song, but one that sounded like Star Wars laser blasters. “An ordinary tourist seeing Baikal ice for the first time is afraid of exactly this - the depth under the transparent armor and the unexpected, cosmic sound of the ice,” Kolganov wrote in the caption of a video. The video shows Kolganov’s feet skating on a glass-like floor of turquoise ice. There is a spider web of cracks spread throughout the floor. As the blue blades attached under his shoes glide and propel forward, the ice beneath his feet emits strange sounds like popping, groaning, crackling, and whatnot. 

The bizarre sound reminded people of science fiction. “Sounds like sci-fi laser guns,” wrote u/-kalos on a Reddit repost of Kolganov’s video. u/ralfton called it “the soundtrack of my nightmares.” u/NatterinNabob likened the sound to “rattlesnake juggling,” whereas u/rigobueno thought it sounded like “an analog synthesizer.” u/Martha_Fockers said the lake’s ice was making “The sound of nope.”

To hear these sounds from Baikal is indeed bizarre, given its status of being the world’s deepest lake and largest freshwater lake. A documentary by SLICE showed that the lake cradles some of the “purest water on Earth,” thanks to tiny organisms that filter out the particles of impurities. Russians have even nicknamed it by names like “Pearl of Siberia” and the “Great sacred sea.” So this otherwise serene body of water emitting laser blaster noises sounds too unbelievable.

But as it turns out, there’s a scientific name for this phenomenon – acoustic dispersion. Typically, frozen lakes undergoing this phenomenon appear to be singing. The singing is produced when an object disturbs the calm of the ice and prompts a domino of vibrations dancing through it. A single sound, for instance, of ice getting hit by a rock, is made up of vibrations of lots of different frequencies, explained NPR’s Skunk Bear.

“After the rock hits the ice, those vibrations move outward through the ice. But the higher frequency vibrations go faster than the lower frequency ones. The more ice they travel through, the more spread out they get. The high notes reach your ears first, and then the low notes. Pew,” the narrator described in the video. He added that the engineers working on Star Wars used the same physics to create blaster sound effects for the film. Nature, after all, is the most magnificent wonderhouse of music.