Lake Nyos Disaster

The Strangest Disaster of the 20th Century.
Posted by Alex in Bathroom Reader on May 21, 2007 at 1:14 am, reposted by www.neatorama.com.

The disaster at Lake Nyos in 1986 remains the worst natural disaster in the history of the West African nation of Cameroon, wiping out almost an entire village of inhabitants, its livestock and wildlife.  This mystery resulted in nearly 2,000 human deaths and 3,000 animal deaths.  This article touches on everything from the discovery of this disaster to the research and efforts to alleviate the problems at Lake Nyos.  

"The remains if the victims offered few clues. There was no evidence of bleeding, physical trauma, or disease, and no sign of exposure to radiation, chemical weapons, or poison gas. And there was no evidence of suffering or “death agony”: The victims apparently just blacked out, fell over, and died."  At this point, scientists had no clue that the lake was the cause of so many deaths, but one of their first clues was the distribution of victims over the land.  All of the deaths has occurred within a 12 mile vicinity of Nyos- the number of deaths increased substantially as they got closer to the lake.  Long story short- The lake was positioned on top of a pocket of volcanic magma which lies beneath the lake- containing extreme levels of Carbon Dioxide.  As in all lakes, carbon dioxide escapes the water- with Lake Nyos, the CO2 does not escape and with its high saturation- basically poisons the water and the air around it.  

This story is intriguing to me .. I've heard about this quite some time ago, and just recently as i've decided to research ideas behind an environment without humans, it became evident that this was something worth investigating.  What gets me most about this disaster, is that when the lake became poisonous it turned this reddish color that became almost mesmerizing ... just thinking about it, if i were to actually be in this environment, I would definitely be curious enough to go check it out.  Which would coincidentally lure me to my own death.  All of this seems pretty morbid- but I cant help but think about these natural disasters that really physically beautiful, but have such unthinkable results.  It can really put an emphasis on the power of nature.