Lake Tahoe is the oldest lake in North America, research shows.

Lake Tahoe is the oldest lake in North America and the third oldest in the world, according to new research presented at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting on Monday in Anaheim.

The finding places Tahoe in the pantheon of the world’s most ancient lakes.

Lake Tahoe is at least 2.3 million years old, according to Winnie Kortemeier, a professor of geosciences at Western Nevada College in Carson City, Nevada. She initially made that discovery in 2012, when she sent samples of volcanic rock she collected near Tahoe City to the U.S. Geological Survey geochronology laboratory for radiometric dating.

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During a sabbatical last year, Kortemeier did more research to compare Tahoe with other ancient lakes, using scientific data from published research papers to create a planetwide timeline — and that’s what she presented on Monday.

“I didn’t use any estimated ages in my ranking of lakes, only published data from research papers,” Kortemeier told SFGATE in an email on Tuesday, after she presented her findings. We also spoke on the phone last week, when she was packing her bags to go to Anaheim.

Lake Baikal in Siberia is the world’s oldest lake, estimated to be 5 million to 10.3 million years old. Kortemeier cites two research papers on Lake Baikal, published in 2000 and 2018. The former research paper dated sediment in core samples at Lake Baikal. The more recent paper dates Baikal using a continuous sedimentary sequence, which refers to the layers in the rock.

The second oldest lake is Lake Tanganyika in East Africa, between 8 million and 10 million years old, according to a 2017 research paper that also looked at a continuous sedimentary........

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