I can see somebody being afraid of water for obvious reasons. You can't breathe in it, it's usually freezing cold, and not everyone knows how to swim in it. But this is a new one: In 1986 in Cameroon, Lake Nyos unexpectedly pumped out a massive discharge of CO2, suffocating 1,700 people.
I find it terrifying to think that a lake can kill you without you even jumping in it. It seems sort of vengeful doesn't it?
A pocket of magma lies beneath the lake which periodically releases CO2 and other deadly gases into the water. It is thought that a landslide initially cause the gas to be released; in the amount of 1.6 million tonnes of Carbon Dioxide.
What you essentially have here is an invisible volcano. The cloud (heavier than air) rushed down valleys and mountainsides into small farms and villages, suffocating people while they slept.
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| Several weeks after eruption |
This story does have a happy ending, in recent years, French geologists have installed degassing pipes into the lake to actually control the outflow of CO2 from the lake to prevent another catastrophic eruption of this kind.
Wksc.
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