Geo (Gio) Rutherford

And it exploded, which really, if you were standing there would have looked like a bunch of bubbles on the surface.

And like, you wouldn't have been able to see anything and you wouldn't have been able to smell anything, but carbon dioxide gas, which is heavier than the surrounding air would have been creeping out of this lake over the edge of the crater and

and then heading down to low-lying valleys.

And unfortunately, there's an entire community that lived in a low-lying valley next to Lake Nyos.

So over 1,800 people died in their sleep.

All of their, all of their animals, all of their livestock, and even all the bugs.

And so the next day when scientists like made their way here, cause this was like a mystery.

Nobody understood what had happened.

Cause everybody, nothing didn't look like anything.

Right.

There was no evidence left behind by this disaster.

And so they eventually figured out that it was Lake Nyos.

This is called a limnic eruption.

There was a lake a few years before this, Lake Menune, which had erupted in a similar way, but had not had such a huge death toll.

And there's a lake in the Rwanda area, like over in the Great African Rift.

It's called Lake Kivu.

It's like on the border of Republic of Congo.

Malawi.

And Lake Kivu is a humongous lake that has the potential to also explode.

But unlike this lake in Cameroon that was near a very small village, Lake Kivu is next to millions of people.