Why These Researchers Are Drawn to the World’s Edge
The ice on Lake Baikal in Siberia is thick and endless, a deep blue covered with fresh powdery snow. It’s a long journey to reach this middle of nowhere. First a six-hour flight from Moscow to Irkutsk, then three hours by car, and finally four hours on the “Matanya,” a train rolling at bicycle speed on the single-track railway hugging Baikal’s breathtaking coast. Built in 1905, if the train were to go any faster than 15 or 20 miles per hour, it would not make the bends and would fall into the lake. Bair Shaybonov’s destination is a single house, right at the edge of the lake, without running water. The toilet is a shack outside.
Shaybonov is an experimental physicist, based at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, a town near Moscow, where he lives with his dentist wife Soelma and two small daughters, Oyuna, 10 and Saryuna, 4. But nearly every spring for the past 14 years, he leaves his family behind for the frozen stillness of Baikal. And his long absences have caused problems. His daughters miss him and his wife has suffered from depression.
