Stuff You Should Know - How can a lake explode?

Episode Date: May 7, 2009

Lakes are usually tranquil bodies of water, but in rare instances, they can be deadly. Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to hear Josh and Chuck discuss lakes that have exploded -- and the factors that create a killer lake. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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to wander. Plan your next dining adventure at visitmississipi.org slash dining. Mississippi, Wanderers Welcome. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Chuck Bryant's with me. Say hey, Chuck. Hi, Josh. How you doing? I'm recovering from Kids Day. Yeah, Chuck and I have actually, I didn't volunteer. Chuck volunteered himself and me to wrangle kids for Kids Day. I gotta tell you that adult to kid ratio was one and a half to one and I'm still wiped. I know. There were literally four kids and what, like eight of us? Eight adults? No, six. Six? Yeah. And I was worn out, man. Yeah,

I know. Kids Day is just awesome. It has the energy. Actually, my favorite part of the day was when he brought them on the tour and then we brought them into the studio and Jerry looked like she was about to crawl out of her skin. Yeah, our producer Jerry does not like kids, it turns out. That was awesome. She put on a real sweet face and was smiling, going, hi everybody. And then the kids got in the sound booth and screamed to see if we could hear them. And we could. We could. Kids are fun, especially 12 year olds. They're great. So I'm glad it's over. Yes. I actually got tapped to do it again next year, did you? No, I just kind of figured we did such a bang up job that they'd want us back. Yeah. Well, anyway, thanks for that, Chuck. You're natural. I owe you big time.

Let's talk about exploding lakes then. Okay. Okay, sure. So, Chuck, have you ever seen a 328 foot tall cloud of death? There's a bathroom joke in there somewhere that my wife would appreciate, but the straight answer is no. Your wife likes scatological humor? Oh, yeah. I didn't know that. I wouldn't have paid her for that. She's dirty. She seems way too intelligent for that kind of thing. Well, she is, but that means nothing. She's still scatological. Well, you know, you know, had you lived around a little lake called Lake Nios in August of 1986, you would have seen a 328 foot tall cloud of death. And had you walked in it, you probably would have died. Right. It was frightening, I bet. It was. Chuck sent me this great picture

that you think we could post that on our blog when this comes out. I don't know. You keep saying that. Did we do that last time? Actually, that would have been today with the face transplant. And I did not get the rights to that. So did you try to get the rights? I did. I looked into it. You're such a liar. Okay. Well, Chuck sent me this great picture of all these dead cows just kind of falling over on their sides around the lake in 1986. Basically, what happened was on, I think, the evening of August 21st, all of a sudden there was this big rumbling sound. In Lake Nios, it's pretty substantial lake. I think it's over 600 feet deep. Yeah. This is in Africa. We haven't even said that. I'm sorry. Yeah. It's in Cameroon. And there was this rumbling

from within the lake. Right. And all of a sudden, this huge column of water shoots out of the middle of the lake hundreds of feet into the air. And as this column is going, this cloud that eventually becomes a 100 meter tall cloud starts to develop. But the thing is, it's kind of hovering close to the lake. So it's a really heavy cloud. Right. And then this cloud gets the bright idea of moving off of the lake and down into the populated valley. Right. Which is, I guess, just where the air flow took it. I guess. And it clung very low to the ground. It sunk basically. It just followed the ground into the valley. And so, you know, you think, hey, there's a cloud. What harm can a cloud do? Sure. But the people who took that attitude paid with their lives. Yeah. To the tune

of 1700 of them. Right. Yeah. People up to 15 miles away from the lake died. Livestock. Livestock people. Some people were knocked unconscious. It depended on the concentration of the secret ingredient we'll get to in a second. Right. And some people were unconscious for like 36 hours. And they wake up and all their livestock and their families dead. I know. Unbelievable. I mean, no, imagine this. Like, really put yourself into that situation. You're hanging around. You're living your life of an idyllic agrarian life around this beautiful lake, which supposedly used to be this gorgeous blue. It was. It was really, really pretty. And all of a sudden, the lake blows up and there's a cloud of death that kills your entire family and knocks you out for a day and a

half. Well, in the lake turn, did you see the after photos? It turned really brown. I didn't. And the water level lowered. And it was, it was disgusting. It looked like a before after photo of like 100 years of like pollution or something. And this was overnight. Yeah. Yeah. So finally, after about two days, this cloud dissipates, but not before it moves through village after village is killing people. And so obviously, when people start to come in to investigate what happened, they find all these dead bodies. The government got involved and rightfully so. Yeah. Sounds like an X files episode. Definitely. It's exactly what it sounds like. But it was real. Yeah. Well, X files is real too. Really? Sure. Based on real accountants as far as I know,

every single one. Yeah. So yeah. So the government gets involved, which means science gets involved because, you know, being an elected official doesn't necessarily make you a sciencey type. You know, you're not an egghead, right? Far from it. Right. So the, the Cameroonian government recruited some scientists to say, what the hell just happened? There's 1700 people that were killed by a cloud death. What just happened? Chuck, what happened in August of 1986 at Lake Nile's Cameroon? Well, Josh, the secret ingredient. And now you know the answer was CO2, carbon dioxide. Yes. Pretty simple. But where did it come from? Well, that's the thing is they, they quickly realized that it was CO2. That wasn't the hard part. Figuring out actually how this

cloud came up from the lake was the hard part. Right. And there were a couple of theories at the time. One is that an underwater volcano had erupted and pushed this gas up, which sounded pretty plausible to me. And actually looked at some of the old articles and that's kind of what they said it was for a while. Right. Well, there's a split camp, right? Yeah. The problem is, is they went through and set up the, the British Geological Survey set up some seismographs around the lake. Yeah. And there should have been some small aftershock earthquakes. Right. And they measured nothing. Not a. They also didn't find any sudden sulfur levels that, that would have been residual from a volcano explosion. Right. Right. So that one kind of got scrapped and they went with the

other camp, which was. Which was a gigantic deadly burp, basically, is how it's described in the article. Right. Which is exactly what it was. So I guess we need to go back in time to when Lake Niles formed to really understand this. Right. We need our back in time music. Okay. So 1986 Chuck, um, what? Ghostbusters is sweeping the nation. Right. Well, no, no, no. We need to go back when Lake Niles was formed. It wasn't in 1986. Oh, we have to go even further back. Here's a, here's our time travel music again. So Chuck, what year are we in? I mean, this place doesn't look very heavily populated. Well, it's a long, long time ago. We're, we're talking what thousands of years before Ghostbusters. Yeah. Seven or eight thousand years, maybe. Okay. All

right. Um, and that, that's a, that's a guesstimation. So if someone from Cameron writes in and says it was actually nine thousand years, then give Chuckers a break on this one. It's a long time ago. So Josh Cameroon in Africa, uh, there's some, there's a lot of weak spots in the crust around that area. And you know what magma is? I do. It's a molten lava that hasn't reached the, uh, the earth's surface yet. Exactly. So it's like liquid rock and, uh, it's another way to put it. Um, it rises from the earth's mantle and, uh, shoots up quickly and vertically and it cuts a tube toward the surface. Right. And when it reaches the surface, the magma can, uh, rain down, rain down a big pile of rock. To form a cinder cone volcano, right? Absolutely. You're with me.

Or, did you have, okay. Can I say the other part because it's cool? Yeah, yeah. Or if this magma, which is shooting up out of the ground, comes in contact with wet rock. Yeah. An explosion happened. Huge explosion. And this is what formed Lake Nios. It formed a big crater. It just went kaboom. And, uh, all of a sudden there's a crater and then this crater started to fill in over the years and now it's a volcanic crater lake. Yeah. Right. Take a crater, add water and you have a lake. Right. Lake Nios. And a very pretty one. Yeah. So basically that's what happened. Um, you've got, uh, at the bottom of the lake, you have an old tube where the magma rose up and, uh, uh, to the surface and it remains there. So if you go down about six miles, you'll hit the magma.

Right. It's staying down there. Yes. But there's still CO2 coming up through this column. Right. Right. But it stays trapped because of the fact that Lake Nios was 600 and, you know, some on feet deep. Right. There's, uh, every 33 feet, there's in one atmosphere of pressure. Yep. Um, and so this is about 20 atmospheres, which is dense and heavy enough to keep a bubble of gas held down at the bottom. Right. Right. The problem is, um, gas builds up in every kind of lake there is, right? Every lake, every pond. Um, I didn't know this. This is interesting. I didn't either. Um, but I'm going to pretend like I did. Watch me go. Um, you know, like when leaves and other organic matter, dead fishies fall to the bottom. Uh, they, they produce gas, CO2,

maybe methane, that kind of thing. And this happens in any body of water, right? Yep. But the thing is in, in most climates and temperate climates, um, there's an actual gas exchange that happens annually. Right. When the temperature is cool, the surface water cools and goes to the bottom, which displaces the gas and it happens very calmly and casually. Yeah. And there you go. There's no explosion. Yeah. Interesting. The problem with Lake Nios and other lakes in Cameroon is that there isn't a seasonal change. It's warm all the time. Right. So just stays away. There's never that turnover and this bubble of gas that's coming up from the magma shaft gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Right. I think magma shaft would be a good pseudonym for

you. That is a good pseudonym. Magma shaft. Yeah. Magma shaft. That's nice. A day of travel brings a basket full of learning in Mississippi with family friendly places like the Mississippi Aquarium, the Hattiesburg Zoo and Tupelo Buffalo Park. Explore today at visitmississippi.org slash family fun. Mississippi Wanderers Welcome. In 1968, five black girls dressed in oversized military fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore. The girls had run away from a reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children and they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mount Mags was

patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy Rice and in a new podcast, I investigate how this reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare and how those five black girls changed everything. All that on unreformed. Listen to unreformed on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So yeah basically it acts like a champagne cork, all this water sitting on top of it and in order actually kind of left out the part at the beginning that something needs to happen to trigger the gas to be released. This is not just going to happen on its own and they think it may have been like a rock slide. Right

or an earthquake. Sure. And usually what happens is the whole bubble doesn't get displaced or the whole layer of gas doesn't get displaced. Part of it will but since it's one big cohesive layer, one part of it being ripped off will dislodge the rest of it. And all of a sudden you've got a huge column of water coming up. Unbelievable. Gas, CO2 going everywhere, forming a cloud of death, but a boom, but a bing, 1700 villagers and countless livestock dead. Yeah and this happened a couple of other times in Africa. There's two other lakes. Cameroon is lousy with exploding lakes. I know. Well it's because of where it's situated. Yes that is true Chuck. It's situated over a very thin part of the earth's crust as you said right. Right and there's two more lakes,

Lake Monoun. That's what I gathered yeah or Monoun and Lake Kivu. Yeah both of those have had incidents as well but not nearly as deadly. Well Lake Kivu hasn't happened yet. Oh it hasn't. Lake Kivu is between Rwanda and Congo and that one if it does happen would be an amazingly catastrophic natural disaster. It's twice as deep as Lake Nios which again remember killed 1700 people from the cloud it produced. So this one's twice as deep and there's about two million people living around it. Right. So they would be in really big trouble if Lake Kivu all of a sudden erupted and it most likely will. They've been studying it and apparently it's right there about to happen. No one's doing a thing about it. Really? Yeah no. They just finally got around to doing something about Lake

Nios. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah that's a great segue actually Josh. Thanks. You're natural. Thanks. You've been doing this a year. We had our one year anniversary by the way. Does anyone even recognize that? No I didn't even know when. Yeah we had a fan come in and we had our 100th episode. A fan came into the office? Yeah. No. No a fan wrote in and said that it was our one year anniversary and we also had our 100th episode. I remember the 100th episode. Yeah one year anniversary. Wow. Happy anniversary beautiful. You too. You too Jerry. Yeah happy anniversary Jerry. So enough of that. Yes what they basically came up with a really basic some of the coolest ideas in science to me are so simple. Yeah. Like you would have thought a kid came up

with this idea basically. Like the space shuttle. Yeah exactly. This thing make a big plane that goes into space. Yeah. They decided to degas it with a big straw. Yeah they just basically put a pipe into the bubble and all of a sudden a bunch of CO2 water came up. And they degas it a couple of times a year. I'm sorry a couple of times a day I think. Yeah. And there's a webcam have you seen the webcam? No but I saw a picture of it. It looks like one of those lakes at like a country club subdivision. The cheesy fountain. Exactly. That's exactly what it looks like. I didn't know there's a webcam. Do you know the address? I don't off the top of my head but. So what do you type in Lake Nios webcam? De-gassing webcam. You can probably find it but before you go there you

should know that the last image is from November of last year so it looks like it may be not actively running anymore. Gotcha. Because I think the whole idea of a webcam is to show things live as it happens. I think so too. Yeah not from November of last year. So that's basically what they did. They put the first pipe in in 2001. A French engineering team. But the sad thing is these foreign scientists who came to Nios to figure out what happened said pretty quickly like this is what we should do. We should top a straw in that. In 1986. In 1986. In 2001 the first pipe went in. But I read that they were hoping to have the CO2 levels down 99% by next year. Oh really? That's what I read. So we'll see what happens. Yeah. Well and I think it looks a little bit

better than it used to as well. It's pretty again. I don't think it's back to where it was pre-1986 when it was a really really cool looking lake but I don't think it's the brown mess that it was right afterward either with cows floating in it and stuff. So you want to hear something interesting? Always. Well first of all these kind of exploding lakes are actually called limnic eruptions right? That's the scientific word for it and we understand the explanation. But the people in Cameroon who lived around Lake Nios had another story for it and basically they the gist of it is that every once in a while evil spirits rose from the lake and killed people in villages. I'm not entirely certain why probably because they were evil spirits right? Right.

But you know what that's called? What? That's called a ephemeralism. Really? When something's explained in a different mystical way? When a myth is clearly based on historical occurrences. Interesting. So they're saying that these exploding lakes had happened before in the past while people were still living around. Right. Pre-science though so they explained it with evil spirits emerging from the lake but pretty much for the same result. Cloud of death at CO2. Right. Cloud of death made of evil spirits. There's in the end you're still dead and so is your livestock. Right. Can you imagine being you know as man evolved and started to figure things out when they first started thinking and saw a volcano like what that must have. I mean they probably

thought the same thing that yeah some someone was trying to kill them. Yeah they always paid it on evil spirits didn't they? Yeah. And now when science is around they're like God is my face red. I know but there's no secrets anymore. It's kind of disappointing. There's still plenty. Do you know how the space shuttle works? No. Well I could go read about it. I guess you could. Figure it out. So Chuck yeah we've got Lake Nios it seems like under control. Lake Kivu is still a problem. Yes. So they haven't stuck the straw on that one yet? Not as far as I know. And then there's one in Ecuador Lake Quilotoa and that one's about if it erupted it would be on the level of for the degree of Nios. Right. So there's exploding lakes just waiting for a limbnik

eruption all around the world. So if you live in the tropics near a lake move. Set your advice. That's my advice yeah. So what do you think is it done? Did we do it? I think we covered everything. You feeling pretty good? Yeah. Are we plugging things any longer? Let's see the blog. Plug the blog. Plug it. I like the plug from the one the face transplant. The Hulk one. Blog good. Yeah. Chuck Josh write blog. Firebat. Firebat. Yeah. Should we just redo that one? Sure go ahead. Should we just reuse the one from that we recorded before? No? Okay Jerry's saying no. So start fresh Chuck. Okay here we go. So Josh we have a blog. We've been plugging this like I'm trying to think of a plug analogy but I can't think of any.

We've been plugging this for a while. It's on the right side of the home page is where you can get it. It's a right rail in tech speak. In tech speak and we've gotten a lot of fans interacting now which is cool and I'd also like to point out that the blog is now where you can go just for little news. Josh and I are kind of venturing out into these little opportunities now being interviewed on ABC news by the way. Being tickled by strangers. Right. Little things like that are starting to pop up here and there so the blog is where we'll promote that and let people know where they can support us and that kind of thing. Yeah I got to tell you Chuck I'm very grateful for some of my friends like my friend SG actually is much smarter than me and knows all sorts of

stuff that I get fed that makes me look smart because I just go ahead and post on it. Oh is this one of the blog commenters? Yes. Yeah nice. Yeah so I've been lost without my smart people. Yeah be lost without them. That was heartfelt. Thanks Chuck. I rarely see that out of you. I know I'm usually just so just dark and angry and evil. Like a sift lord. Kind of. Sift without the red face paint. Right. So I guess that's plugging. Yeah that's the plug fest. You guys have been plugged and now it's time for a listener mail. Oh not yet Josh. Oh no. In 1968 five black girls dressed in oversized military fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to take it anymore. The girls had run away

from a reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro children and they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mount Megs was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy Rice and in a new podcast I investigate how this reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare and how those five black girls changed everything. All that on unreformed. Listen to unreformed on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1980 cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital

of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the wild wild west. Unleashing a wave of violence. My god took a walk into the devil's den. The car fells. They just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamora Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it all for the CIA. Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered. Oh no not by a long shot. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Listen

to murder in Miami on the I heart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And now right now it's time for listener mail. Josh you just have one under the banner of exceptional exceptional sorry listener mail. But that is a long one. Chuck you're going to read the whole thing. No I'm going to I'm going to do my scan thing. This comes to us from Helen in Guatemala. Specifically in Quetzaltenango Guatemala. And she is writing in about the 2012 episode. She lives in the Western Highlands and there's still my people there. Lots of them. And she has been fascinated here so much about this 2012 stuff but only from U.S. media outlets. Apparently none of the Mayans are talking about.

No one cares about. I got that impression too when I was researching. I think we even mentioned that. But yeah it's very much Western. Yeah very much. She said our own calendar begins every week month the year etc. The Mayan calendars all function in a circular rather than linear concept of time and form cycles that repeat infinitely. So they don't believe the world's going to end at any particular point on the calendar. The repeating cycles are based on the idea of keeping count of the passage of time which is very important in the culture. So she did want to compliment us that we've come closest to just completely debunking this. Yes. In most U.S. media outlets. Don't tell it to the Belgians though. Right. She did want to point out however that I believe at one point

one of us said something about the Mayan calendars are used in secret. She said that's not really true. You can get them in bookstores all over the place there and they are used and different calendars have different uses which I thought was interesting. There's three major ones. An everyday calendar for planning everyday stuff fittingly. A religious calendar for planning rights and ceremonies and an agricultural calendar for planning planting and harvesting. And they still use these and get books on how to use them and it sounds like a really kind of an interesting thing. So I can see that daily calendar you know them selling it like things to do today if you're Mayan. Right. Yeah. Stock up on canned goods. In case world ends

in 2012. So Helen thank this and she's in Guatemala and she's a cool lady. Thanks Helen. We appreciate it. If you live in Guatemala, Guam or anywhere else and you want to send Chuck or me an email send it to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics visit howstuffworks.com. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? In 1968 five black girls were picked up by police after running away from a reform school in Mount Megs Alabama. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy Rice and in a new podcast I investigate the abuse that thousands of black children suffered at the Alabama industrial school for Negro children and how those five girls changed everything. Listen to unreformed on the iHeart

radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1980 cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. The cartels they just killed everybody that was home. Setting an aspiring private investigator on a collision course with corruption and multiple murders. The detective agency would turn out to be a front for a drug pilot would claim he did it all for this CIA. I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Talk about walking into the devil's den. Listen to murder in Miami on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.