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That night in 1986, Lake Nyos showed its most horrible face. The one of death.
It was August 21, 1986. The heat in Cameroon was unbearable. For the villagers, Cha, Nyos and Subum it was just another day. But they did not know that death awaited them.
One of the strangest and most mysterious natural disasters in human history has occurred at Lake Nyos, a lake that formed over a volcanic crater in northwestern Cameroon.
Without warning, the lake released hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic carbon dioxide, estimated at 300,000 to 1.6 million, and this silent cloud of death swept across the countryside at a speed of about 100 km / h (62 miles / time). a few minutes of suffocation – lack of oxygen – 1,746 people and more than 3,500 animals.
The result was as devastating as the speed and severity of a biblical attack. Within a 25 kilometer radius, death was met by locals and wildlife. Many people from the villages of Cha, Nyos and Subum were silent while they slept. Some were found with blood around the nose and mouth.
When the few survivors woke up, they found no signs of unrest, no chaos or violence, only corpses. Even the flies had dropped dead.
Journalists in the area described it as the aftermath of a neutron bomb.
Joseph Nkwain, who woke up 3 hours after the cloud, spoke of his tragic experience in a conversation with University of Plymouth researcher Arnold H. Taylor:
“I couldn’t speak, I was paralyzed, I couldn’t open my mouth because I smelled something terrible σα I heard my daughter snoring in a terrible, irregular way… When I dragged the distance towards my daughter κρεβά κρεβά… I collapsed and fell. My hands have some sores and I really don’t know how I got them. I wanted to talk, I couldn’t breath, when I bent down to pick her up, my daughter was already dead ”.
It is one of the deadliest natural events in history and scientists still have no idea what caused it.
“It was one of the strangest catastrophes scientists have ever investigated. “Lakes don’t explode overnight and thousands of people disappear,” George Kling, an ecologist at the University of Michigan, told The Guardian in 2005.
Was the lake the killer?
At the time, the researchers concluded that Lake Nyos released a large amount of CO2 around 9pm and because the CO2 is heavier than the surrounding air, it quickly settled into the surrounding valleys, covering everything with a layer of 50 meter thick toxic gas.
Usually hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 are stored dissolved at the bottom of the lake, but this time something “pulled the lid.”
As David Bressan explains for Scientific American, volcanic gases released from the ground below the lake dissolve and accumulate in its deeper waters, and tropical temperatures form a kind of lighter warm water “layer” over its denser and more dense water. cold. background with dissolved gas.
It’s unclear what “broke the seal” and allowed deep, polluted water to rise up, but it could be an earthquake, landslide, or volcanic eruption or even something as simple as heavy muddy rains flowing into the lake and fill from bottom to top, raising water levels.
The trigger to boil the water was silent, but the results were disastrous.
“The lake literally exploded in what is known as a limnic eruption, sending a column of water over 90 meters high into the air and creating a small tsunami,” says Atlas Obscura.
Conspiracy theories
In the absence of a scientific explanation, the conspiracy theories gave and took, with some locals believing the explosion was caused by an unannounced bomb test carried out by the governments of Israel and Cameroon.
Surprisingly, something similar happened in the surrounding area just two years earlier at Lake Mimony, where an explosive CO2 blast killed 37 people. Again, no one knows what caused that explosion.
To prevent these lakes from exploding again, in 2001 engineers installed pipes in both to absorb CO2 from the layer at the bottom of the lake and gradually release it into the air.
Another set of pipes was installed in 2011 after investigators warned of a gas explosion “that could be larger than any of these disasters.”
Solving this problem, another appeared: the natural wall surrounding Lake Nyos began to recede and the concern was that if something changed the land around it and removed it, then there was no way to predict what would happen if the content spilled onto it.
Since then, a dam has been built around the shoreline to protect it from receding, and although the researchers believe it will hold for the near future, processes such as weather or lake flooding “could cause immediate collapse.”
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