The serendipitous side of science and Siberia

The Siberian research vessel on Lake Baikal used by the Kozhov family, whose members have gathered lake samples for more than six decades.
The Siberian research vessel on Lake Baikal used by the Kozhov family, whose members have gathered lake samples for more than six decades.

By Brian Charles Clark, Washington State Magazine

Big, deep, and ancient — that’s how Stephanie Hampton and her colleagues describe Lake Baikal. You might also add “remote” because, as Siberians used to like to say, “God is high above, and the czar is far away.”

Containing 20 percent of the planet’s fresh water, the lake is an object of intense study for scientists wanting to understand how a warming planet affects plant and animal life. Hampton is one of those scientists–but only rather serendipitously.

She earned her reputation as a data-crunching limnologist with her work on Lake Washington. When Marianne Moore, a colleague of hers who had been taking students to Lake Baikal for years, came back from one such trip and told Hampton that there was a family of Russian scientists who had been collecting data in the lake for 60 years, Hampton was intrigued.

Moore suggested that they get in touch with the Russians to see if they could collaborate to analyze it. “And that’s just what we did,” Hampton says, “12 or 13 years ago.”

Russian science, Hampton says, has a long tradition of systematic monitoring and taxonomy. That perspective drove Mikhail Kozhov’s ambitious sampling program on Lake Baikal starting in 1945. Every week, in all seasons, he and his colleagues would head out to the middle of the lake in a big boat and pull up a sample of lake water. Then they’d count the microorganisms and microscopic plants and animals in the water, identifying them by species, if possible, and even noting which were females, which were males, and who was carrying eggs–“very detailed,” Hampton says.

In 60-some years, there were only a few frozen-over weeks when samples were not collected. Five months of the year, when the ice was its thickest, the scientists hiked or drove to sampling sites. It was only when ice was too thin to walk on but too thick to get the boat out that the sampling regimen was interrupted.

The work Kozhov started was continued by his daughter, Olga Kozhova and, in turn, her daughter, Lyubov Izmesteva. It was Izmesteva who worked with Hampton and Moore in analyzing the family’s data.

The seminal book on Lake Baikal by Russian scientist Mikhail Kozhov
The seminal book on Lake Baikal by Russian scientist Mikhail Kozhov
Inscription from Mikhail Kozhov
Inscription from Mikhail Kozhov

But Hampton’s serendipitous connection to the family of Russian scientists doesn’t end there.

One day she was perusing books on eBay when she came across the seminal work on Baikal by Mikhail Kozhov. Buy now! And when it arrived, “I opened the book and got the chills!” The book was inscribed to a famous American limnologist, John Brooks.

The next time she and Izmesteva crossed paths, Hampton showed the Russian scientist the inscription. “Yes,” said Izmesteva, “that is my grandfather’s writing.”

You could pour all of the water from North America’s Great Lakes into Lake Baikal and have room left over–room, maybe, for a few chance encounters of the scientific kind.

Hampton’s research is featured in the article Microbe Whisperers in the Winter 2017 issue of Washington State Magazine.