Doomed to Fail - Ep 142 - Death Lurking in the Deep - Limnic Eruptions

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

Listen, as we know, there are terrible things in lakes. Monsters. There are monsters. This week we learn that there ALSO can be buildups of poison underneath lakes that can 'erupt' at any time and do a clean sweep of all animal life around it. We'll talk about two times in recent history (and we have reason to believe it happened in ancient times) when methane gas killed everyone around Lake Kivu and Lake Nyos in Africa.More terrifying ways the earth can kill you, good thing we're taking such good care of her, right? Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And we are back, Taylor. I'm just pumped, full of energy, just thrilled right now, and everything's just gravy. How are you doing? Good.

Good. Going to a fundraiser tonight for our friend Derek. running for Congress. Oh, Derek, Derek Marshall. Mm-hmm. So if he lived in the high-deller. Wait, so he got through his primary?

Yes. He did last time as well. Yeah, he did both. He did the 2020 and now. I don't get, is a Republican, is he running as a Democrat? He's running as a Democrat.

Yes. Against a Republican. Is it a Republican district? Yes. Uh, okay. Is it a big Republican district? Is it like a 70-30 swing Republican district? Yeah.

yeah yeah yeah yeah um i know but i'm excited and you know it's nice like some of the parents that i know are there and that kind of thing you know make what is it like a gala fundraiser or um no it's at this place um in joshua tree called sacred sands which my kids soccer coach owns and it's like an event space a hotel you can get married there it's like a really pretty house in the middle of joshua tree very cool very cool we'll have fun of Ben tell him I said hi

if he even remembers me he probably doesn't remember I'll just list off people we might know at the same time yeah sweet so it is my time to share and oh wait let me

I'm sorry let me intro oh yeah can you hear if I do this with my fan she has a little I'm going to share this with me not really it's so hot

it's like 100 degrees still um hello everyone welcome to doom to fail I'm Taylor joined by Fars. We cover histories most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week. And today is Thursday and it's Fars' turn.

And I'm Pars and I'm going to be sharing a fun new way to die that I just learned. Yay! Yeah, this is a, and it's funny because there's actually some overlap with your story of this week. So this is a natural disaster I'd never heard of before, which is rare to discover a new type of natural disaster and thought I'd cover it. it um you might have heard of this because you might have researched this as part of the volcano series but have you ever heard of a thing called a limbic re eruption not top of my head okay so it is a thing that if it happens around you like you will almost certainly die but it is seemingly pretty rare there have only been two cases of a limbic eruption actually

being documented and recorded within history although it is almost impossible that this only happened twice we only know about these two because of the death toll that it had associated with it but so it's very possible that this thing this occurs around the world on a regular

basis and it's just not observed because nobody's around to see it happen and see the body's dropping so so let's get into what it is and it shares some similarities with your story around sarin gas. Oh, great. So a limbic eruption, it's an event that occurs when there's an abundance of CO2, carbon dioxide, contained within a very, very deep lake that is deep enough to dissolve the CO2 underwater pressure. It has to be a calm environment, meaning there's not a bunch of stuff happening around it so that the CO2 has a very, very long protracted period of time to build up, get dissolved within this lake.

then a new thing has to happen, which is a natural phenomenon has to occur that creates a disturbance in which all the CO2 is released. So the way to, if you're trying to like do a cross-section visualization of this, the way to think about it is like imagine like a cross-section of a lake and in the very bottom you have all this dissolve CO2,

then there's all this water above it, and then there's no reason for the CO2 to kind of migrate further up because the pressure is so high to keeping it low, but then something can happen that just disrupts everything on the bottom and then shoves it all the way to the front, all the way to the top. Is it a gas? No.

CO2 is a gas. So it's like a gas under the water, like a bubble. Gas in the water. Okay. It's just like that part of the water has extra CO2 in it. Yes. Yes. I hate lakes.

I hate them. This is going to be a scary one then. Hocklates, go ahead. So I'm going to break this episode down. to three parts. It's going to be a fairly quick episode, actually, because this doesn't happen that often, thankfully. But I'm going to talk about the largest known limnick disaster in history, the possibility of it happening again, and also how it can be avoided. So, I'm going to say, don't go to lakes. Don't go to lakes. So the largest known limnic eruption

ever recorded was in Lake Nios, which is in Cameroon. It is about a half of a square mile around, and it reaches a depth of 682 feet, which is pretty deep. Wow. So below the lake is an inactive volcano. And despite the volcano being extinct, it still contains a magma. It still contains magma in its chambers 50 feet or 50 miles beneath the lake. It's very far. That magma produces CO2 and kind of burps up CO2 into the rocks and the sand.

And eventually migrates its way under, like at the very bottom of this lake, where given its depth of over 600 feet, there's an immense amount of pressure that is applied to it. I do the calculation for this. It is roughly 21 atmospheres of pressure. And what you need to dissolve CO2 is, like, you need about a fourth, maybe a half of that pressure to be able to dissolve CO2. you need it to dissolve because it has to if it doesn't dissolve it can just go to the top and be released well yeah we're doing what what's happening is a CO2 just breaking up in the water and it's becoming part of the water and that's where that's there in lies the problem it's called saturation it's being overly saturated with the CO2 and I'm going to give you a really

great example of how big of a deal this is in like two paragraphs give or take okay so So next to Lake Nios is Nios Village, which was built about a half mile from the shoreline and populated by around 4,000 people and just thousands of their livestock. It's a little village in Cameroon. On August 21st, 1986, what we assume is that landslide occurred. We don't know definitively. Scientists and geologists have ruled out that they're saying it's unlikely that it was a small earthquake that happened because nobody reported tremors and they never, that didn't document anything.

from her so it had to have been a landslide that occurred and that is what ended up causing the events that are about to unfold. This landslide disturbed the lake enough that all that CO2 that was dissolved and captured within the water at the very bottom of this lake

was released up the water column and out. To put into perspective the magnitude of what happened, the lake dropped three feet when this yeah it was this is a

lot of CO2. Like that's a crazy amount like for a lake to drop. It generated a wave 82 feet tall. Like this was like a crazy event. If anybody actually observed it. So because CO2 is dense with an air, the CO2 settled on the ground and then traveled with the wind, which was going downstream to the village. The final tally of what happened was 1,746 people. in around 3,500 cattle all suffocated to death. I thought you should have two people were going to die. Like everyone

died? It just happened twice. So it happened twice. In this case, about half the people in this village died. The rest of them were cognizant and aware of what was going on to run away. That's the only chance you have to run away because karma dioxide poisoning is also called hypercapnia.

And there's various stages of it. So, like, like a light version of this would be you get a little bit dizzy, you get a little bit confused, a more intense version of this, you can fall into a coma, you can convulse yourself to death. But no matter what, you're breathing something that your body cannot absorb to run your body. And so you suffocate in the process because you're too saturated with CO2 and not enough oxygen. Whoa. And that's what happened to these 1,700 people.

there's the other one that happened actually haven't I think that was also in camera but it was only two years earlier it was only two years earlier I think 86 people died it was like a smaller village there but it was just right in this exact same time zone it was 84 and then this was in 86 so thinking about the possibility of it happening again so 1300 miles from Lake Nios is an even scarier place called Lake Kibu it is in the middle and on the border of both Rwanda

and the Congo and it is way bigger it is about it's over a thousand square miles of surface area and it has a max

depth of just under 1,600 feet it is way bigger yeah I hate it yeah what's crazy it's like the 12th biggest lake

or the deepest lake like there's like lakes that are like ocean depth It's crazy. I hate it. Yeah. So this lake is also between two active volcanoes and also has magma kind of funneling CO2 underneath it.

But it also has other things. It has other gases, things like methane that are also being introduced into the lake bed. So scientists have found evidence of mass extinction events all around this lake, meaning this thing has had limnick eruptions in the past. and it just keeps happening over and over again. I just picture like a hand coming out of the lake and being like... Yeah. You know, it's being like, everything around me.

Pretty much as a gas is exactly what happened. Did it kill the plants too? I don't think so. Okay. Because it wouldn't like instantly kill them, but like everything. Okay. Continue. It's the thing.

Plants don't like breathe like we do. And so like by the time the gas dissipates, it will have time to recover. Also, it consumes CO2 and it spits out oxygen. So it's the exact inverse of us. So it had like a really good day. The people are gone. It had a really good day.

The plants were just thriving. Yeah, exactly. The people going to like an oxygen bar. Yeah. Yeah. So because they saw that all around this thing was all this mass extinction stuff because they could see through like time all these fossils basically. And they realized that like this thing is due for one of these anything at this point.

and it would suck because roughly 2 million people live near the lake and so the government and the scientific community kind of decided like hey what do we do about this like we can't just let this thing burp up the way the other one burped up and kill everybody around us

so the question becomes how do you avoid it there are different solutions for different types of gas mixed into lake water in the case of Lake Nios basically what they did was very simple they installed like going all the way down from the top these pipes to the bottom of the lake bed they attach that to a water pump and so what happened is that the water pump would draw water from

the very bottom this over hyper CO2 saturated water right as it rises in the water and column the water pressure reduces and the water releases the CO2 releases the CO2 and the CO2 just starts burping out of the top of this pipe. And because of the, something about how water pressure works, because of this, it's a self-perpetuating cycle. So you just leave this pipe there,

and the CO2 water, the CO2 evaporates or goes out of the top, and then it draws more water from the bottom. The cycle is self-sustaining at this point. So that's all it is. All they did was they just dropped a bunch of pipes in Lake 9. to remove the CO2 and at this point it is incredibly unlikely for there to be one of these limnic eruptions on that lake at least Lake Kivu is different in the sense that because it's

so close to so many active genos there's a ton of methane in there and so you can have the same situation to happen if it was to release methane because you also shouldn't be breathing methane. So on the one hand, they did the same thing they did at Lake Nios, which just dropped these pipes all the way to the bottom and have that kind of filter the water out and fill the CO2 out. But they also had to figure out a way to deal with the methane situation. So what they ended up doing, the government did, was they ended up selling the rights to the lake's methane to energy companies who could run methane extraction platforms on the lake to then sell back to businesses and consumers. So as of 2016, a 200,

million dollar power plant was built to harness and use the methane extracted the lake and as a result it has made the lake safe and well as safe as a 1500 foot lake could be but it's also become like a huge economic stimulant to the area and so that's what they do now they just run methane extraction platforms and then self-sustain which is kind of cool that is cool yeah so that's that's again a short one but given the week i've had i don't think anybody is going to blame me and and hopefully you all learned of a new weight that nature can kill us again i mean those big lakes nothing good ever happens to them speaking of which how crazy is this death toll with the hurricane i know 600 people is that real was that when i read 600 maybe i heard that

They were telling people, like, it's at 128 dead. Hundreds are missing. So, yes. Definitely more than that. But they were saying, like, if you, we are told to leave and you didn't leave, write your name on your leg and permanent markers who can identify you. Could you imagine? And I think it hit Asheville.

It did. Destroyed big parts of Asheville. We were there just a year ago. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty. My brother's boyfriend from there and a lot of his friends, like,

They just were sharing photos, and it's really terrifying. That is nuts. That is nuts. Yeah. I'll hope whoever could get out of the way, got out of the way. I know. It's just like, whenever I hear those and see those, just like the destruction is crazy.

The death is crazy. Like, it's just, it's awful. Yeah, like, how do you go back to normal life after that? I guess you can't. I mean, I guess you just, I mean, you just got to rebuild and people, you know, still live in these dangerous places that we live in and all the things. But, oh, yeah, it's really bad. Hopefully, yeah, I don't know. It's terrible.

Harrington Lake in Kentucky is 249 feet deep. That doesn't even feel bad. Oh, my God. I actually kind of want to interrupt thinking about that deep of a lake. Yeah, the one in Russia is 5,400 feet deep. deep. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's over a mile deep.

Nope. Terrifying. More than 20% of the Earth's unfrozen freshwater is there. Where? In Lake Baikal, in Russia. Yeah. Oh, here's an image. It shows you how deepest.

Oh, my God. World's deepest lakes. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I feel like the ocean is deep and that's also terrible, but like a deep lake feels worse. Yeah, I don't know why. I think maybe it's just like, yeah, like, there's stuff in there that has never had a chance to leave. I don't know.

You know what I mean. Well, we were in, we were in, like, we were canoeing in like the Chesapeake Bay and like a little inlet over the summer. And we like went in a canoe and then lawn and flow. on a paddleboard and the kids jumped off the canoe and we're swimming and then we came back and as we're putting the canoe up there was a snake in the water and I was like oh my god I hate it so much it's just like the top of the water hey it's their environment um sweet well that was my story again I know it's short one but I'm trying to you know um it's not that much about this topic because it just doesn't happen that often yeah and like because they figured out a way to stop it from happening

yeah yeah i thought if it like really is a danger that it looks like it's happened before in like the past which we would never know be able to like find out the details of because it killed everyone around it you know yeah it's it's weird because like a monster living you're like it requires like so many conditions to be present mm-hmm so many things yeah like it's just like who's thinking about that like is there volcanic activity under here like i don't know it has a lot going on because usually you don't equate volcanic activity with it not being or with it being calm

usually the two don't kind of work together. Right, but like so much is happening underneath the calm. Yeah, yeah. Like in every case. I like when the Russians try to dig like the deepest hole possible and they can't get very far. I don't what happened to that hole.

They can't give very far because like at a certain point like everything you try to put in their melts you know. So you can't just dig all the way through it. Cola super deep borehole. It is 40,000 feet deep. See, that's kind of scary too.

I was watching something. Maybe it was for kids, but it was like if you dug a hole all the way through the earth and you jumped into it, if no one stopped you, the way that gravity works is you would just fall all the way the other end of the world, hop out, and then go right back down. And it would just keep happening. Yeah, you would just go like in and out. out of the of the earth anyways um do you have anything aiding the list off um no just thank you everyone for listening i've got a couple ideas via instagram from lindsay and kiera so thank you both

um and keep them coming i really appreciate it and please again tell your friends um email us doom de philopod at gmail dot com doom to philpod on all the socials and give us reviews and let us know what you want here Sweet. We'll go ahead and cut it off there. Thank you, Taylor. Thank you.