August 21, 1986.
A man named Joseph shakes himself out of a haze.
His head is thumping.
He’s almost delirious.
His nostrils are filled with the most noxious smell.
He tries to say something, but words won’t come out of his mouth.
He surveys his body.
It’s stained red and covered in painful blisters.
Before he can assess what’s happened, he loses consciousness.
He wakes up again and walks into his daughter’s room.
She’s already departed from this world.
With eyes filled with tears, he slowly walks over to his neighbor’s house.
All of them are dead.
In every house in the village, he finds nothing but death.
Riding on his motorcycle outside of the village he sees no sign of life.
People he knew, even the animals in the fields: all of them are dead.
This was one of the worst natural disasters ever to befall mankind, and the worrying thing
is, it could happen again.
Let’s now go back to the start, early evening close to Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon.
Nothing is out of the ordinary, there are no signs of what’s about to come.
Like on any other evening, Joseph is preparing dinner.
His daughter is outside playing with her dog.
The villagers are cooking their meals, smokes from fires billows above their huts.
Just after 9 pm, some of them swear they can hear a strange rumbling sound.
Many people are already asleep, their bellies full, unaware that they’re having the last
dreams they’ll ever have.
In just moments to come, they will be dead, as will just about any other living thing.
Not far away at the lake, the rumbling stops for a while, and then whoosh, a massive jet
of water some 300 feet high (91 meters) sprays into the air.
This has never happened before, at least not for a long, long time.
This serene lake, which the locals rely on for their drinking water, has a dark secret
no one is aware of.
When that jet of water rose into the air it brought with it carbon dioxide that had been
building up in the lake for maybe a thousand years.
The gas formed a huge cloud, as wide as a football field, and it moved towards those
villagers at a velocity that made it almost inescapable.
When it arrived at the huts in those villages, it wrapped around those people like a cloak
of death, there was nothing they could do.
With only carbon dioxide to breathe, they passed out and died fairly quickly from suffocation.
Some people survived, but not many.
Joseph, who is very much a real person, was one of those survivors.
He woke up at one point but then collapsed again.
He recalled seeing red on his trousers, his body covered in what he called a “starchy
mess”.
Later in an interview, he said, “I wanted to speak, my breath would not come out.”
He wasn’t even in the worst-hit village, which was one of the reasons why he survived.
After seeing his daughter lifeless and then seeing how most of the village was dead, he
got on his motorbike and headed over to the village of Wum.
This is what he said about that perilous journey: “I didn't see any sign of any living thing
... When I got to Wum, I was unable to walk, even to talk ... my body was completely weak.”
When he arrived there he was met with utter devastation he could not ever have imagined
in his worst nightmare.
Death everywhere, people were just lying in the road, collapsed over fences; dead cows
in the hundreds were lying in the fields.
Chickens, pet dogs, all just lying on the ground not breathing.
Still, in a few of the huts there were some people still breathing, but only just.
Some of them would wake up in a day or two, only to find every single member of their
family had passed away.
It seemed impossible, and we guess to a western audience, something straight out of an apocalyptic
movie.
Word soon got to western scientists- nobody had heard of a catastrophic event of such
magnitude.
Just what had happened?
Soon newspaper headlines read things like, “Aid, and scientists, flow into Cameroon.”
Teams of experts from North American and Europe booked their flights, hoping they might solve
this mystery of this mass death.
Why would so many people just die and there not be any clear sign of what did it?
It seemed at first to be what is called “outgassing.”
This is when gas has been trapped and it suddenly gets released.
But what happened at Lake Nyos isn’t common at all, in fact, it was a strange thing indeed,
the worst of its kind in recorded history.
The scientists first had to understand just what had come out of the lake and what had
made that water spray into the air with such violence.
They lowered containers into the lake so they might check just what was in the water.
They were shocked to find that when they pulled some of those containers to the top, the lids
blew off.
What was certain is that there was so much carbon dioxide in the water that it created
enough pressure to cause the lids to blow.
What had happened at the lake, they agreed, was a “limnic eruption.”
This is when dissolved carbon dioxide is somehow displaced from the bottom of a lake, and as
happened in this case, a large cloud of gas moves through the air, killing most living
things in its path.
Everything caught in its wake suffocates in such a case.
The human death toll was almost 1,800, with over 3,500 livestock dying, all in an area
of 16 miles (25 km) of the lake.
These events are incredibly rare, but it had happened before, again in Cameroon, at Lake
Monoun in 1984.
That time, 37 people died.
But get this, there’s a lake in Africa where a limnic eruption could occur and the lake
is 1,700 times larger than Lake Nyos.
It’s also surrounded by about two million people.
If an eruption happens, it could be one of the worst disasters known to man.
We’ll come back to that soon.
First, let’s look more closely at what went down at Nyos.
Scientists were sure that a limnic eruption had occurred, but they weren’t sure what
caused it.
Some geologists put forward the idea that a massive landslide had caused it, but others
said it must have been an earthquake.
Still, if that was true, wouldn’t have someone felt it?
None of the survivors had felt the ground move beneath them prior to the gas attack.
What seemed certain was that around 1.2 cubic kilometers of gas ended up forming that giant
cloud.
The water turned a red color at the time as a result of the bottom part containing a lot
of iron, mixing with the air and being oxidized.
That’s why Joseph saw red all over himself.
You might wonder why the cloud just didn’t disperse in the air and harmlessly move right
over the heads of the villagers.
The reason is carbon dioxide is denser than air.
That’s why it moved low through the valleys and made its way to the villages.
It moved fast, too, at around 12–31 mph (20–50 kilometers per hour).
Of course, that’s not easy to get away from, but some people did.
Most others suffocated and died without even knowing what was happening.
The survivors didn’t get off easy.
Many suffered from breathing problems after the disaster, while most of them had lesions
all over their bodies.
Some even became paralyzed, but later recovered.
Scientists wanted to know what had caused all those injuries.
They figured CO2 was certainly the main culprit, but the release of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen
sulfide could also have caused people injuries.
In Joseph’s words, “My arms had some wounds ... I didn't really know how I got these wounds.”
You can look at any medical website and it will tell that exposure to hydrogen sulfide
can cause headaches, nausea, convulsions, and certain eye and skin irritations.
Joseph also said he smelled something awful, and that could have been the rotten egg malodor
of hydrogen sulfide.
The villages were evacuated for the time being while the researchers stayed.
In fact, they had some disturbing news to report back to the Cameroonian government.
That carbon dioxide was growing in the lake at a disturbing rate.
If something wasn’t done about it, a similar disaster could happen again.
One survivor was named Suley.
She lost all her children and another 31 members of her family.
She lost over 400 cattle, too.
In the aftermath of the disaster, she and the other survivors even remarked that there
weren’t any flies on all the dead bodies.
The flies themselves had died.
Those survivors banded together and helped each other out the best they could, but they
were still afraid of the lake.
They hadn’t in the past had much interest in science, but instead, myths surrounded
the lake.
Some of those stories stated it was home to their dead ancestors, and that it might rise
up one day and cause calamity.
Tales of how dangerous the lake was had been passed on through generations.
They were right, but perhaps ignorant of exactly what caused the danger.
Scientists talked about such “geomythology”, saying no doubt catastrophes have happened
over many years and stories have been passed down.
What they wanted to do was make sure there were no more catastrophes.
They got to work, not knowing if something would go off again and they’d be the ones
lapsing into a coma and dying.
The villagers that survived invited them into their homes and made sure they always got
a good meal.
You have to remember this place was extremely remote.
The only hotel was a hut.
Over the weeks and months, they figured that the lake, made from a crater, sat on top of
volcanic rubble.
They knew carbon dioxide was down there and that springs could take it into the water.
They didn’t know what had caused the massive eruption, but they knew where that gas had
come from.
It was a time bomb.
It was sure to go off again one day.
They considered digging tunnels down there to try and free the gas, but that would cost
way too much.
They even tinkered with the idea of using explosives to free the gas, but that was deemed
a bit on the dangerous side even if the immediate area was evacuated.
In the end, they decided to lay down a pipe at the bottom of the lake and let the gas
run through that.
Small amounts could slowly be released through the pipe and then come out of the top of the
pipe into the air.
Some experts thought that would be too dangerous, but by the time 2001 rolled around a pipe
had been laid and the degassing of the lake began.
Right now, the lower parts of the area around Nyos are still eerily quiet.
Many people have moved to safer places, but the disaster is never far away from their
thoughts.
Some others missed the place where they’d lived for so long, and are now living aside
the great lake again.
The good news is that the experts say there are just three lakes in the entire world where
so much carbon dioxide can cause such a disaster.
Those are Lake Nyos, Lake Monoun that we mentioned, and Lake Kivu, which sits on the border of
The Congo and Rwanda.
The problem with Kivu is it’s a giant, as we said, 1,700 times bigger than Nyos and
surrounded not by just small villages but millions of people.
Just remember that scientists don’t exactly know what caused the Nyos eruption, so it
seems such a thing could happen without any warning signs.
If Kivu erupts, it could be a disaster like no other the world has ever seen.
Scientists went there after the Nyos disaster and what they found was a supersaturation
of gas, meaning, it was a disaster waiting to happen.
Sure, such events are supposed to take place maybe every 1,000 years, but no one knows
when the last one happened.
What they do know is very large extinction events have occurred around that lake.
They say if it should happen again, and given a long enough timeframe it should, then a
lot of those two million people could die.
Experts also warn that lake tsunamis could also occur, due to those explosions of gas.
Pipes could be built to allow the gas to release in a safe manner, but there are around 510
million metric tons of carbon dioxide down there.
That’s about two percent of what’s released into the atmosphere each year from humans
burning fossil fuels.
Right now, there are no pipes at Kivu.
The locals might not have experienced such a catastrophic event in the area, but they’ve
heard of the word “Mazuku”.
This is Swahili and in English, it means “evil wind”, a wind that blows over people and
animals and even plants, and when it’s passed all in its wake are dead.
Now you need to watch, “Worst Natural Disasters in Human History.”
Or, have a look at, “How Fukushima Disaster ACTUALLY Happened.”