Cameroon's Lake Nyos Gas Burst: 30 Years Later

Abstract

On 21 August 1986, a lethal carbon dioxide (CO2) cloud burst from the bottom waters of Lake Nyos in northwestern Cameroon, killing 1746 people and more than 3000 livestock. Early on, there was disagreement over whether the cause for the gas release was a volcanic or a limnic eruption, the latter a rare event (http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2013/07 /26/lake_nyos_killed_1746_when_it_released_a_huge_pocket_of_co2.html) in which CO2 suddenly comes out of solution and erupts from the water. When Lake Nyos’s bottom water naturally recharged with CO2 in the years after 1986, it became clear that the limnic eruption hypothesis was the most likely.