How a Lake Killed 1,700 People in One Night

In August 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon released a huge amount of carbon dioxide, killing more than 1,700 people in the valleys below. How can a lake hold that much gas, and how do you get it out without another disaster? This kind of gas release is called a limnic eruption. A bottle of fizzy water helps explain both what happened and how the degassing pipes work. Chapters 0:00 Fizzy water and Lake Nyos 0:30 The night of the disaster 0:43 How gas builds up in a lake 1:36 How the gas escapes 3:00 What set it off? 3:13 The degassing pipes 4:00 Keeping the build-up under control Sources and further reading USGS investigation of the 1986 disaster: https://pubs.usgs.gov/of/1987/0097/re... Michel Halbwachs on the gas release and degassing system: https://www.nyos-degassing.com/whatha... https://www.nyos-degassing.com/princi... Carbon dioxide measurements at Lake Nyos, Boehrer et al. (2021): https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/... NASA Earth Observatory: Lake Nyos https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-... Image credits Lake photographs: U.S. Geological Survey, including Jack Lockwood and Bill Evans; USGS investigation report; panorama via Wikimedia Commons. Satellite image: NASA Earth Observatory / Jesse Allen, using USGS Landsat data (18 December 2014). Map data: Natural Earth. Diagrams and animation were made for Curious Bit. Subscribe to Curious Bit for more.