Lake Nyos

But unfortunately, almost exactly two years later, the fog would emerge once more.

It happened about 100 kilometers away from Manaun, on a body of water called Lake Nyos.

Night had fallen on the evening of August 21st, 1986, when a loud noise was heard coming from the water.

Quickly, the lake began to bubble, almost as if it had turned to a boil.

With this discovery, scientists have now been able to install pipes in the water that allow these lakes to release their CO2 without any large explosions.

making Manaun and Nyos seemingly safe from another limnic eruption, at least for now.

And fortunately, eruptions like this require a confluence of incredibly precise geological conditions, with scientists only confirming three lakes across the entire world that are capable of experiencing such a disaster, which means that not only are Lake Manaun and Lake Nyos now safe from these eruptions, but the world as a whole is as well.

Well, not exactly.

Plague six is boils and blisters, man and beast.

Can an earthquake-induced gas leak explain this kind of outbreak? Let's go back to the 1986 disaster at Lake Nyos, Cameroon.

At the time, people living along the lake developed strange boils and burns.

It turns out that carbon dioxide mixed with air put people into a kind of coma, reducing circulation to the skin, causing the kind of boils described in the Bible as plague number six.

carbon dioxide would have seeped to the surface, and being heavier than air, would have killed animals and sleeping people before it dissipated harmlessly into the atmosphere.

In case you think all this is conjecture, consider this.

It happened in exactly the same way in 1986 at Lake Nyos, Cameroon.

On the fateful night of August 21st, the villagers at Nyos went to sleep.

They simply stopped.

Something had come out of Lake Nyos in the night.

something the world had never seen before.

This case stuck with me in a way I didn't expect.

It looks peaceful enough from a distance, rich volcanic soil where plantains and maize grow tall and herds of white Zubu cattle graze along with grassy, steep ridges.

And perched high on a volcanic ridge sits Lake Nyos, a deep crater lake cupped inside a ring of black basalt cliffs like water resting

in an iron bowl.

For hundreds of years, the elders of the local Kalm and Fulani tribes told stories about that water.

The

spirit in the deep water had risen, walked through the dark, and taken its deadly harvest.

In the years following the disaster, engineers installed tall degassing pipes directly into the floor of Lake Nyos to slowly and continuously vent the carbon dioxide toward the sky,

preventing the deadly pressure from ever building to a breaking point again.

He begins seeing dead bodies around cooking fires, dead bodies sitting at tables, dead bodies in their homes.

He rides his bike to Lake Nyos, where that village is named for, and finds hundreds of dead bodies lying along the lakeshore.

Strangers still, there are no flies buzzing around.

They're completely gone.

It's a tragic scene made all the more horrifying because it seems so inexplicable.

Scientists from across Africa, the U.S. and France are sent to investigate.

and they discover something ominous under Lake Nyos' waters.

Lake Nyos is sitting on top of a magma pool where carbon dioxide is venting continuously into the waters in the depths of the lake and reaching super high

High in the hills of northwest Cameroon, in West Africa, there's a lake that sits inside the crater of an old volcano.

Lake Nyos.

A little over a mile long.

Steep walls, grass on the slopes, and water so deep it was usually a dark, clear blue.

It looks peaceful enough from a distance, rich volcanic soil where plantains and maize grow tall, and herds of white zebu cattle graze along the grassy steep ridges.

And perched high on a volcanic ridge sits Lake Nyos, a deep crater lake cupped inside a ring of black basalt cliffs like water resting in an iron bowl.

For hundreds of years, the elders of the local Kham and Fulani tribes told stories about that water.

Now, they weren't campfires meant to make children giggle before bed.

By the time the government authorities and international relief teams arrived by helicopter, the scene looked like the aftermath of an unearthly apocalyptic strike.

Over 1,740 human beings and more than 3,500 head of livestock had perished across the valley without a single wound, a broken bone, or a drop of blood spilled anywhere.

Then, when scientists hiked up the steep trail to the crater to see what had happened, they found that Lake Nyos had transformed.

The once deep blue crystal water had turned a sinister rusty iron-red color, the result of iron-rich deep water being dredged up from the abyss and oxidizing in the daylight.

But nature has its own invisible assassins.

The Lake Nyos disaster in Cameroon in 1986.

A volcanic crater leak.

Villagers went to sleep.