Pictured: The world's biggest drawing which measures an astonishing THIRTEEN miles across

This spectacular artwork is the world's largest drawing and at 12.5 square miles it would be able to find room for 4,469 Wembley football pitches.

Etched onto the surface of Lake Baikal, in Russia's windswept and frozen Siberia, it was created by land artist extraordinaire Jim Denevan and his team in March of this year.

Commissioned by clothing firm Anthropologie to create the work for their advertising tie-in series The Anthropologist, Jim, 49, spent 15 days on the surface of Lake Baikal completing the drawing.

Frozen asset: You can just see artist Jim Denevan at the centre of this detail from his extraordinary twelve and a half mile square drawing

Using the frozen black ice beneath the white snow as a canvas, Jim and his team lived in a native tent, or 'yurt' which was set up on the frozen ice surface.

Drawn using snow ploughs for the enormous circular lines and shovels for the smallest 18-inch circumference lines, Jim set his pattern using a mathematical Fibonacci curve which contains over one thousand separate circles.

Jim 'drew' his creation before the team begun using a simple bike and stick, which he rode around lining his artwork into the snow.

Now THAT'S a crop circle: A truck traces out one of the smaller circles in Jim's giant 'drawing'

'This is the largest drawing in the world and beats my previous record which was a sand drawing in the desert of Nevada, which had a circumference of nine miles,' said California resident Jim.

'This drawing is almost ten percent bigger than that, but was designed differently to take into account the shore line of the lake.'

'The circle to the right on the Fibonacci curve holds the same dimensions as my Nevada drawing, but of course it is not a total circle because of the lake's geography.'

The sheer scale of the artwork with this photo montage which shows the 'land art' superimposed on New York's Manhattan island

Travelling to Khuzhir on Olkhon island in the middle of Lake Baikal in March, Jim set out to draw his latest record breaking creation.

'We originally wanted to go to the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica to do this drawing, but after some research I realised that this part of Lake Baikal behaved similarly to the deserts I was used to,' said Jim.

'They usually experience a prolonged period of low pressure over the lake, which means that even though the temperatures are generally around five or ten below zero, it doesn't snow.'

'That meant that we could part the snow on top of the lake ice and create the drawing without interruptions.'

Dwarfing man and truck, the artwork stretches off into the distance...

Of course nothing went quite as smoothly as planned.

'The process begins with me riding around the lake on my bike with a stick,' said Jim.

'That allows me to draw the outline using both the wheels and the stick to push away the snow.'

'However, after around the fifth day when we were just getting to work with the larger snow ploughs it snowed.'

'This covered up all my previous outlines and we had to work hard to see where they were to make sure we were on the right tracks.'

Braving the chill Siberian climate and driving the snowplough around on top of the four and half feet thick ice, Jim and his team salvaged the project.

'However, on the ninth day, we experienced a storm, which blew the snow back on top of the lines we had created, some of which were eight feet wide,' said Jim.

'That was disheartening to say the least.' Tirelessly working through day and night, Jim and his team had completed their work by the 15th day.

'This is an iconic setting for such a surreal and beautiful work, even if it only lasted for just over a month before it disappeared,' explained Jim.

"Lake Baikal contains up to 20 percent of the world's fresh water and is also in remote and mysterious Siberia.

'Battling the cold and the wind and the logistical problems was exhausting, but this is a beautiful work and one I am very proud of.'

Remote Lake Baikal is the world's oldest and deepest fresh water lake





No jacket required: An earlier Jim Denevan work, a 3 mile long piece of sand art in the rather warmer environs of the Nevada Desert.



