Lake Emits Carbon Dioxide Bubble, Kills 1800 People

Grazing cattle killed in the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster

On the morn­ing of August 22, 1986, a man hopped onto his bicy­cle and began rid­ing from Wum, a vil­lage in Cameroon, towards the vil­lage of Nyos. On the way he noticed an ante­lope lying dead next to the road. Why let it go to waste? The man tied the ante­lope onto his bicy­cle and con­tin­ued on. A short dis­tance later he noticed two dead rats, and fur­ther on, a dead dog and other dead ani­mals. He won­dered if they’d all been killed by a light­en­ing strike – when light­en­ing hits the ground it’s not unusual for ani­mals nearby to be killed by the shock.Soon the man came upon a group of huts. He decided to see if any­one there knew what had hap­pened to the ani­mals. But as he walked up to the huts he was stunned to see dead bod­ies strewn every­where. He didn’t find a sin­gle per­son still alive — every­one in the huts was dead. The man threw down his bicy­cle and ran all the way back to Wum.

Find out exactly what hap­pened (and the sci­ence behind it) at Neatorama » Blog Archive » The Strangest Dis­as­ter of the 20th Cen­tury via Digg

6 Responses to “Lake Emits Carbon Dioxide Bubble, Kills 1800 People”


  • i’m eric. join­ing a cou­ple boards and look­ing
    for­ward to par­tic­i­pat­ing. hehe unless i get
    too distracted!

    eric

    • Rick Harold

      Eric have you got­ten it together long enough to focus . this is your life at stake .

  • ha ha those sheep deserved it

    • you are so crule to ani­mals those sheep did not deserve it if u dont have anny thin nice to say dont say it at all or ill come bust you up! leave em alone

  • First of all thank you for a such won­der­full topic, well i have to say it is dif­fi­cult for me to say if i agree with you or not. I will read it for a sec­ond time and let you know what i think

  • This is true and there have been sci­en­tists that inves­ti­gated this and the result­ing pro­gram has been aired on tv. It forms on the bot­tom and rises to the top in a gas cloud that sucks the oxy­gen out of the air. Gen­er­ally there is a vol­canic activ­ity under the water that can pro­duce this. In areas around the world includ­ing the ocean this is pos­si­ble threat.

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