In August 1986, a beautiful lake in Cameroon killed 1,746 people in a single night. No fire. No flood. Nothing anyone could see. Lake Nyos sits in an old volcanic crater. Deep below, magma leaks carbon dioxide into the water, and the gas built up under pressure for years — like the fizz in a sealed soda bottle. On the night of 21 August, something disturbed the deep water. Scientists still do not know what set it off — a landslide is the leading theory. The gas burst out in what scientists call a limnic eruption. Colourless, odourless, and heavier than air, an invisible cloud rolled downhill at 45 miles an hour into the villages below, pushing the oxygen out of the air. By morning, 1,746 people had died where they were. Farmer Ephriam Che heard a rumbling like a rockslide and saw a strange white mist rise from the lake. Halima Suley heard a rumbling like the shouting of many voices, then a great wind. She passed out and woke more than a day later — she had lost four of her children. It had happened before: two years earlier, the same thing killed 37 people at nearby Lake Monoun. Today, a pipe runs from a raft down to the lake's deepest water, letting the gas out slowly. It has worked since 2001.
Real picture: Lake Nyos, 1986 — photograph by Jack Lockwood, U.S. Geological Survey (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons).
Music: original music bed mixed by Claude in the build.
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