[Rockhounds] Earth's Largest Lake in History Lands in Guinness Book of Records

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

The largest lake in Earth’s history is now in the Guinness Book of World
Records. The Paratethys—or Lake Paratethys, if you will—and contained 10
times more water than all of Earth’s modern lakes. In other words, it’s
long overdo for its place in the Guinness Book.

At its height, the Paratethys stretched from Austria in the west to
Turkmenistan in the east. It covered 1.08 million square miles (2.8 million
square kilometers) and contained about 407,000 cubic miles (1.77 million
cubic kilometers) of water. The research detailing the exact measurements
of the lake was published in Scientific Reports
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91001-z> in 2021, and now the
lake’s scale has been documented in the Guinness Book of World
Records—hardly the all-encompassing atlas of absolute truths but still a
neat accolade.

The Paratethys existed about 11.6 million years ago. It housed giant
species, like the baleen whale *Cetotherium riabinini*—granted, the
smallest-known baleen whale—and the swamplands around it were home to the
proboscidean *Deinotherium*, a giant even among its elephantine relatives.

https://gizmodo.com/largest-lake-earth-history-paratethys-guinness-record-1851115638