Lake Nyos Disaster

On August 22nd, 1986 nearly 2000 people were killed by an unprecedented disaster. A man rode from Wum, his village in Cameroon, to Nyos, a nearby village. On the way there, he passed numerous dead cattle and a handful of dead rats. He simply assumed that this was because of a lightning strike, as dead animals were often times a result of lightning strikes. When we walked into the village, he was surprised to find that there was nobody around, and it was completely silent. He walked into one of the huts to find multiple dead bodies. He dropped everything and sprinted back to Wum. Whenever he arrived back in his home town, he realized that survivors from Nyos were starting to make their way back to Wum and telling their story. It turned out that Lake Nyos was a "crater lake". It had formed from water filling up in what was thought to be a dormant volcano. The volcano however, was and still is not completely dormant. It is constantly leaking massive amounts of CO2 into the water.

The Lake Nyos disaster was caussed by a gigantic bubble of CO2 shooting up out of the lake (up to 300 feet into the air) and spreading about 12 miles at an astonishing 45 miles per hour. The death toll was estimated to be about 1,746 people, however this is not an accurate amount since the survivors had started to bury the dead in mass graves. On top of the 1,746 people there were over 3,000 cattle killed and an unbelievable amount of birds and other wild animals.

Scientists now know that this disaster was a result of CO2 constantly being released from what was thought to be a dormant volcano underneath of the lake. As it turns out, the volcano is still relatively active, just without any major eruptions. Researchers in the area now make weekly trips to the lake to monitor the carbon dioxide levels and make sure that there isn't another major build-up in order to prevent another disaster like this one from happening again.