The Lake That Killed 1,746 People in One Night — Lake Nyos

On the night of August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos, a quiet crater lake in the highlands of northwest Cameroon, killed 1,746 people and around 3,500 cattle in a single night. It did not flood and it did not burn. The lake released an enormous cloud of carbon dioxide that poured over its rim, rolled down the valleys and suffocated the villages of Nyos, Kam, Cha and Subum while people slept. This is the true story of the Lake Nyos disaster: the rare "limnic eruption" that turned a calm blue lake rust-red, the survivors who woke up to silence, the rumours that followed, the warning two years earlier at Lake Monoun, the pipes that now let the lake breathe safely, the weak natural dam that still worries scientists, and the far bigger lake, Lake Kivu, where two million people live beside the same kind of danger. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open 0:49 A Quiet Lake in the Hills 2:48 The Night of August 21st 5:32 The Morning After 8:02 Rumours and Answers 10:11 The Warning at Lake Monoun 11:20 The Lake That Refills 13:17 The Wall 14:33 The Giant Next Door 16:10 The Silent Lake 17:06 Next Time New videos every other day. Subscribe to Beneath The Black. Next: Thonis-Heracleion, the lost Egyptian city under the sea (Sunday, 9 PM). Sources (facts checked; uncertain claims are marked "reportedly" or "by some estimates" in the video): Wikipedia: Lake Nyos disaster (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster) Wikipedia: Lake Nyos; Lake Monoun; Lake Kivu Kling, G. W. et al. (1987), Science 236: The 1986 Lake Nyos gas disaster in Cameroon, West Africa Baxter, P. J. et al. (1989), BMJ: Lake Nyos disaster, Cameroon, 1986: the medical effects RFI (2026): An invisible avalanche: what happened in Cameroon's 1986 Lake Nyos disaster Halbwachs, M. et al.: Degassing the "killer lakes" Nyos and Monoun, Cameroon Credits: Footage: Pexels and Pixabay contributors (free licence). Photos via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY / CC BY-SA / public domain; full list of authors and licences in the asset credits). Some scenes are AI illustrations and are labelled "ILLUSTRATION" on screen. Narration: synthetic voice. Music and sound effects: AI-generated for Beneath The Black. #LakeNyos #Mystery #Documentary