21st August, 1986 there was a strange natural disaster, it happened in the Northwest region of Cameroon, Africa at Lake Nyos which is known locally as “Bad Lake”. The local folklore spoke about an evil spirit that would come up to kill all of those that lived near it, and now the legends seem to have been part of a very real threat.
The Lake was formed in a volcanic crater, only around 400 years ago, and they have high levels of CO2 due to the volcanic activity, the gas is usually released by the natural water turning but this lake is unusually still and effectively acted like a gas storage lake, which pressured and became a time bomb.
21st August, 1986 the something triggered off the time bomb, perhaps a landslide or something as simple as cold rain, either way a Limnic Eruption occurred, the lake literally exploded sending around 3000 feet into the air. The result of this was a tsunami but the gas was far more deadly than the water spouting up at 3000 feet into the air. A deadly gas spilled out over the area, the local villages nearby were practically wiped out, 6 of 800 of the villagers survived. CO2 settled and the fire was immediate. The spreading cloud went out around 25km away and people sleeping with no relatives to wake them would never have known what the situation was, or the death coming to them.
A total of 1,746 people were killed, the villages of Nyos, Kam, Subum and Cha were all but pretty much wiped out, along with around 3,500 livestock. It all happened in a matter of minutes and the lake turned deep reed with the change of iron churned up from the bottom of the lake.
It has been monitored since that point; a simple solution of a pipe in the lake allows gas to regularly escape. This may not be enough though, and a natural dam on the lake looks to be slowly threatening to fail: if that happens it could be a disaster of flooding and the gas escaping all at the same time.
Nearby is another concern that Lake Kivu is 1,000 times larger and in a more populated area, it has been shown to have a history of sending local creatures into extinction around every 1000 years. They believe it could be far more concerning if that volcano should go up.
Investigations into the unknown and weird 