Post by LaFille on Feb 27, 2008 1:33:30 GMT
The discovery of such natural hazards is pretty recent and impressive... At least it is to me. ;D I only learned about that phenomenon recently and thought that others might too.
The Lake Nyos and Lake Monoud tragedies, from a 2003 Smithsonian.com article by Kevin Krajick (really worth reading full)...
The Lake Nyos and Lake Monoud tragedies, from a 2003 Smithsonian.com article by Kevin Krajick (really worth reading full)...
ON THE NIGHT OF THE APOCALYPSE, Ephriam Che was in his mud-brick house on a cliff above Nyos, a crater lake in the volcanic highlands of northwest Cameroon. A half-moon lit the water and the hills and valleys beyond. Around 9 p.m., Che, a subsistence farmer with four children, heard a rumbling that sounded like a rockslide. Then a strange white mist rose from the lake. He told his children that it looked as if rain were on the way and went to bed, feeling ill.
Down below, near the lake’s shore, Halima Suley, a cowherd, and her four children had retired for the night. She also heard the rumbling; it sounded, she would recall, like “the shouting of many voices.” Agreat wind roared through her extended family’s small compound of thatched huts, and she promptly passed out—“like a dead person,” she says.
At first light, Che headed downhill. Nyos, normally crystal blue, had turned a dull red. When he reached the lake’s sole outlet, a waterfall cascading down from a low spot in the shore, he found the falls to be, uncharacteristically, dry. At this moment he noticed the silence; even the usual morning chorus of songbirds and insects was absent. So frightened his knees were shaking, he ran farther along the lake. Then he heard shrieking. It was Suley, who, in a frenzy of grief and horror, had torn off her clothing. “Ephriam!” she cried. “Come here! Why are these people lying here? Why won’t they move again?”
Che tried to look away: scattered about lay the bodies of Suley’s children, 31 other members of her family and their 400 cattle. Suley kept trying to shake her lifeless father awake. “On that day there were no flies on the dead,” says Che. The flies were dead too.
He ran on downhill, to the village of Lower Nyos. There, nearly every one of the village’s 1,000 residents was dead, including his parents, siblings, uncles and aunts. “I myself, I was crying, crying, crying,” he says. It was August 21, 1986—the end of the world, or so Che believed at the time.
All told, some 1,800 people perished at LakeNyos. Many of the victims were found right where they’d normally be around 9 o’clock at night, suggesting they died on the spot. Bodies lay near cooking fires, clustered in doorways and in bed. Some people who had lain unconscious for more than a day finally awoke, saw their family members lying dead and then committed suicide.
Within days scientists from around the world converged on Nyos. At first, they assumed the long-dormant volcano under its crater had erupted, spewing out some kind of deadly fumes. Over months and years, however, the researchers uncovered a monstrous, far more insidious geologic disaster—one thought to exist only in myth. Even worse, they realized, the catastrophe could recur, at Nyos and at least one additional lake nearby. Since then, a small band of dedicated scientists has returned here repeatedly in an attempt to head off tragedy. Their methods, remarkably low-tech and inexpensive, may very well work. “We are anxious to protect the people there,” says Gregory Tanyileke, a Cameroonian hydrologist who coordinates experts from Japan, the United States and Europe.
[...]
On August 15, 1984, two years before the catastrophe at Nyos, a strangely similar incident, albeit on a smaller scale, took place at Monoun, a bone-shaped crater lake about 60 miles south of Nyos. Monoun is located in a populous area, surrounded by farms and bordered in part by a road. Just before dawn, Abdo Nkanjouone, now 72, was biking northward to the village of Njindoun when he descended into a dip in the road. Parked along the road was a pickup truck belonging to a local Catholic priest, Louis Kureayap; Nkanjouone found the priest’s dead body next to the truck. Moving on, he found another corpse, a man’s body still astride a stalled motorcycle. “Some terrible accident has happened,” thought Nkanjouone. Sinking into a kind of trance, he became too weak to bike and continued on foot. He passed a herd of dead sheep and other stalled vehicles whose occupants were dead. Beginning to climb uphill now, he encountered a friend, Adamou, walking toward him. He says he wanted to warn Adamou to turn back, but Nkanjouone had lost the capacity to speak. As though in a dream, he shook Adamou’s hand silently, and the two continued in opposite directions. Nkanjouone made it into Njindoun alive. “God must have protected me,” he says. Adamou and 36 others traveling that low stretch of road at the time did not survive.
Rumors about the disaster arose instantaneously. Some said that plotters attempting to mount a coup d’état, or perhaps the government itself, had carried out a chemical attack. Conspiracy theories abound in Cameroon, where unexplained events are often attributed to political intrigues. But a few officials looked to the local geology, theorizing that the long-dormant volcano under LakeMonoun had reactivated.
The U.S. embassy in Yaoundé called on Haraldur Sigurdsson, a volcanologist from the University of Rhode Island, to travel to Cameroon to investigate. Venturing out to the lake several months after the incident, Sigurdsson performed an array of analyses and found no signs of a volcanic eruption. He detected no indication of temperature increase in the water, no disturbance of the lake bed, no sulfur compounds. But a strange thing happened when he hauled a water-sample bottle from the lake depths: the lid popped off. The water, as it turned out, was loaded with carbon dioxide.
That curious finding prompted Sigurdsson’s recognition that, indeed, the deaths around LakeMonoun appeared to be consistent with carbon dioxide asphyxiation. Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless gas heavier than air. It is the normal by-product of human respiration and the burning of fossil fuels—probably the main culprit in global warming. But at high concentrations, CO2 displaces oxygen. Air that is 5 percent carbon dioxide snuffs candles and car engines. A10 percent carbon dioxide level causes people to hyperventilate, grow dizzy and eventually lapse into a coma. At 30 percent, people gasp and drop dead.
Carbon dioxide is also a natural by-product of geologic processes, the melting and cooling of rock. Most of the time it’s harmless, surfacing and dispersing quickly from vents in the earth or from carbonated springs—think San Pellegrino water. Still, CO2 poisonings have occurred in nature. Since Roman times, vented carbon dioxide in volcanic central Italy occasionally has killed animals or people who have wandered into topographic depressions where the heavy gas pools. At YellowstoneNational Park, grizzly bears have met the same fate in a ravine known as Death Gulch.
Sigurdsson, after a few weeks, began to conclude that carbon dioxide from magma degassing deep under LakeMonoun had percolated up into the lake’s bottom layers of water for years or centuries, creating a giant, hidden time bomb. The pent-up gas dissolved in the water, he believed, suddenly had exploded, releasing a wave of concentrated carbon dioxide. He wrote up his findings, calling the phenomenon “a hitherto unknown natural hazard” that could wipe out entire towns, and in 1986, a few months before the Nyos disaster, he submitted his study to Science, the prestigious U.S. journal. Science rejected the paper as far-fetched, and the theory remained unknown except to a few specialists.ThenLake Nyos blew up, killing 50 times more people than at Monoun.
[...]
The scientists motored out onto Nyos in inflatable dinghies to take water samples and look for clues. Once again, some assumed that an underwater volcano had erupted. But others immediately grasped that the villagers around Nyos had perished under the same conditions previously documented at Monoun—that Sigurdsson’s “unknown natural hazard” was real. [...]
Down below, near the lake’s shore, Halima Suley, a cowherd, and her four children had retired for the night. She also heard the rumbling; it sounded, she would recall, like “the shouting of many voices.” Agreat wind roared through her extended family’s small compound of thatched huts, and she promptly passed out—“like a dead person,” she says.
At first light, Che headed downhill. Nyos, normally crystal blue, had turned a dull red. When he reached the lake’s sole outlet, a waterfall cascading down from a low spot in the shore, he found the falls to be, uncharacteristically, dry. At this moment he noticed the silence; even the usual morning chorus of songbirds and insects was absent. So frightened his knees were shaking, he ran farther along the lake. Then he heard shrieking. It was Suley, who, in a frenzy of grief and horror, had torn off her clothing. “Ephriam!” she cried. “Come here! Why are these people lying here? Why won’t they move again?”
Che tried to look away: scattered about lay the bodies of Suley’s children, 31 other members of her family and their 400 cattle. Suley kept trying to shake her lifeless father awake. “On that day there were no flies on the dead,” says Che. The flies were dead too.
He ran on downhill, to the village of Lower Nyos. There, nearly every one of the village’s 1,000 residents was dead, including his parents, siblings, uncles and aunts. “I myself, I was crying, crying, crying,” he says. It was August 21, 1986—the end of the world, or so Che believed at the time.
All told, some 1,800 people perished at LakeNyos. Many of the victims were found right where they’d normally be around 9 o’clock at night, suggesting they died on the spot. Bodies lay near cooking fires, clustered in doorways and in bed. Some people who had lain unconscious for more than a day finally awoke, saw their family members lying dead and then committed suicide.
Within days scientists from around the world converged on Nyos. At first, they assumed the long-dormant volcano under its crater had erupted, spewing out some kind of deadly fumes. Over months and years, however, the researchers uncovered a monstrous, far more insidious geologic disaster—one thought to exist only in myth. Even worse, they realized, the catastrophe could recur, at Nyos and at least one additional lake nearby. Since then, a small band of dedicated scientists has returned here repeatedly in an attempt to head off tragedy. Their methods, remarkably low-tech and inexpensive, may very well work. “We are anxious to protect the people there,” says Gregory Tanyileke, a Cameroonian hydrologist who coordinates experts from Japan, the United States and Europe.
[...]
On August 15, 1984, two years before the catastrophe at Nyos, a strangely similar incident, albeit on a smaller scale, took place at Monoun, a bone-shaped crater lake about 60 miles south of Nyos. Monoun is located in a populous area, surrounded by farms and bordered in part by a road. Just before dawn, Abdo Nkanjouone, now 72, was biking northward to the village of Njindoun when he descended into a dip in the road. Parked along the road was a pickup truck belonging to a local Catholic priest, Louis Kureayap; Nkanjouone found the priest’s dead body next to the truck. Moving on, he found another corpse, a man’s body still astride a stalled motorcycle. “Some terrible accident has happened,” thought Nkanjouone. Sinking into a kind of trance, he became too weak to bike and continued on foot. He passed a herd of dead sheep and other stalled vehicles whose occupants were dead. Beginning to climb uphill now, he encountered a friend, Adamou, walking toward him. He says he wanted to warn Adamou to turn back, but Nkanjouone had lost the capacity to speak. As though in a dream, he shook Adamou’s hand silently, and the two continued in opposite directions. Nkanjouone made it into Njindoun alive. “God must have protected me,” he says. Adamou and 36 others traveling that low stretch of road at the time did not survive.
Rumors about the disaster arose instantaneously. Some said that plotters attempting to mount a coup d’état, or perhaps the government itself, had carried out a chemical attack. Conspiracy theories abound in Cameroon, where unexplained events are often attributed to political intrigues. But a few officials looked to the local geology, theorizing that the long-dormant volcano under LakeMonoun had reactivated.
The U.S. embassy in Yaoundé called on Haraldur Sigurdsson, a volcanologist from the University of Rhode Island, to travel to Cameroon to investigate. Venturing out to the lake several months after the incident, Sigurdsson performed an array of analyses and found no signs of a volcanic eruption. He detected no indication of temperature increase in the water, no disturbance of the lake bed, no sulfur compounds. But a strange thing happened when he hauled a water-sample bottle from the lake depths: the lid popped off. The water, as it turned out, was loaded with carbon dioxide.
That curious finding prompted Sigurdsson’s recognition that, indeed, the deaths around LakeMonoun appeared to be consistent with carbon dioxide asphyxiation. Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless gas heavier than air. It is the normal by-product of human respiration and the burning of fossil fuels—probably the main culprit in global warming. But at high concentrations, CO2 displaces oxygen. Air that is 5 percent carbon dioxide snuffs candles and car engines. A10 percent carbon dioxide level causes people to hyperventilate, grow dizzy and eventually lapse into a coma. At 30 percent, people gasp and drop dead.
Carbon dioxide is also a natural by-product of geologic processes, the melting and cooling of rock. Most of the time it’s harmless, surfacing and dispersing quickly from vents in the earth or from carbonated springs—think San Pellegrino water. Still, CO2 poisonings have occurred in nature. Since Roman times, vented carbon dioxide in volcanic central Italy occasionally has killed animals or people who have wandered into topographic depressions where the heavy gas pools. At YellowstoneNational Park, grizzly bears have met the same fate in a ravine known as Death Gulch.
Sigurdsson, after a few weeks, began to conclude that carbon dioxide from magma degassing deep under LakeMonoun had percolated up into the lake’s bottom layers of water for years or centuries, creating a giant, hidden time bomb. The pent-up gas dissolved in the water, he believed, suddenly had exploded, releasing a wave of concentrated carbon dioxide. He wrote up his findings, calling the phenomenon “a hitherto unknown natural hazard” that could wipe out entire towns, and in 1986, a few months before the Nyos disaster, he submitted his study to Science, the prestigious U.S. journal. Science rejected the paper as far-fetched, and the theory remained unknown except to a few specialists.ThenLake Nyos blew up, killing 50 times more people than at Monoun.
[...]
The scientists motored out onto Nyos in inflatable dinghies to take water samples and look for clues. Once again, some assumed that an underwater volcano had erupted. But others immediately grasped that the villagers around Nyos had perished under the same conditions previously documented at Monoun—that Sigurdsson’s “unknown natural hazard” was real. [...]
- An early part of the 'On the road again' story describes the phenomenon and how the party deals with it...
.com
Does it have to do with the ancient one in Messel? 
- No, not at all - I just wanted to indicate that the phenomenon was known amongst us authors