On the night of August 21, 1986, Lake Nyos in Cameroon released a massive cloud of carbon dioxide that rolled down the surrounding valleys and suffocated people and animals in their sleep. By morning, thousands are dead, in one of the deadliest and strangest natural disasters of the twentieth century.

This episode follows the Lake Nyos disaster from the crater lake’s volcanic geology to the silent nighttime gas release, the medical and scientific investigation that identified a limnic eruption, and the long effort to keep it from happening again through controlled degassing and dam stabilization. It’s a story about a hazard you can’t see, and a lake that can rebuild the same deadly conditions if the monitoring ever fails.

*Our hearts go out to the victims of this tragedy and their families. This podcast does not linger on those details out of respect for the living. We mainly focus on the 'how this happened' rather than fixate on the toll. For more information, please refer to the sources below.

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Sources: – Tuttle, M. L., et al. The 21 August 1986 Lake Nyos Gas Disaster, Cameroon (USGS Open-File Report 87-97, 1987). – Baxter, P. J., Kapila, M., and Mfonfu, D. “Lake Nyos disaster, Cameroon, 1986: the medical effects of large scale emission of carbon dioxide” BMJ 298 (1989): 1437–1441. – Kling, G. W., et al. “Degassing Lakes Nyos and Monoun: Defusing certain disaster.” PNAS 102, no. 40 (2005). – Lockwood, J. P., Costa, J. E., Tuttle, M. L., Nni, J., and Tebor, S. G. “The potential for catastrophic dam failure at Lake Nyos maar, Cameroon.” Bulletin of Volcanology 50 (1988): 340–349.