From the Kazakhstan border to the Pacific, the search for elephants begins...

In keeping with the immensity of Siberia, which is larger than the US and western Europe combined, the Norilsk Nickel/Rio Tinto joint venture area is enormous.

From west to east it is nearly 4,000km wide and takes in four time zones. Points of reference for its extremities are the easternmost point of Kazakhstan and the port of Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. To the north, swampy coniferous forest that the Russians call taiga marches across huge horizons towards the Arctic Circle. To the south, mountain ranges with peaks reaching 4,500m separate Siberia from the high steppes of Central Asia.

History and ethnicity have divided the joint venture area into a number of administrative regions with varying degrees of autonomy. In some of them there are substantial non Russian minorities whose forbears came from Mongolia, the Turkic lands to the south west, or across the long border with China. (Rivers such as the Amur form that border over much of its length, and the part nearest to Mongolia is marked by a counterpart of China’s more famous Great Wall.) There are also representatives of some of the many groups of indigenous people who lived in Siberia before it became part of Russia.

Mountain ranges spread through much of the joint venture area – but its best known geographic feature is a lake. Some 630km long and 70km wide, with water up to 1,637m deep, Lake Baikal is said to be the largest freshwater reservoir in the world. Still remarkably unpolluted, the lake supports aquatic life forms that include over a thousand species found nowhere else. You might expect as much of an enclosed body of clean water that has been in existence for about 25 million years.