Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
Speaker 1: from house Stuff Works dot com? Hey, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Chuck Bryants with me. Say hey, Chuck, Hi, Josh.
Speaker 1: How you doing. I am recovering from Kids Day? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Chuck and I Actually I didn't volunteer. Chuck volunteered himself
Speaker 1: and me yes to wrangle kids for Kids Day. I
Speaker 1: gotta tell you that adult to kid ratio was one
Speaker 1: and a half the one and I'm still wiped. I know.
Speaker 1: There were literally four kids and what like eight of
Speaker 1: us eight adults? No six six? Yeah, I was worn out, man. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Kids Day is just awesome to the energy. Actually, my
Speaker 1: favorite part to day was when he brought him on
Speaker 1: the tour and then we brought him into the studio
Speaker 1: and Jerry looked like she was about to crawl out
Speaker 1: of her skin. Yeah, yeah, our producer Jerry does not
Speaker 1: like kids. It turns out that was awesome. She put
Speaker 1: on a real sweet face and was smiling, going hi everybody,
Speaker 1: And then the kids got in the sound booth and
Speaker 1: screamed to see if we could hear them, and we could.
Speaker 1: Kids are fun, especially twelve year old, So I'm glad
Speaker 1: it's over. Yes. I actually actually got tapped to do
Speaker 1: it again next year, did you No? I just kind
Speaker 1: of figured we did such a bang up job though
Speaker 1: they'd want us back. Yeah. Well, anyway, thanks for that, Chuck. Um,
Speaker 1: let's talk about exploding lakes then. Okay, okay, sure, So, Chuck,
Speaker 1: have you ever seen a three hundred and twenty eight
Speaker 1: foot tall cloud of death? There's a bathroom joke in
Speaker 1: there somewhere that my wife would appreciate. But the straight
Speaker 1: answer is no, your wife like scatological humor. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. I her for that. She's dirty.
Speaker 1: She seems way too intelligent for that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: She is, but that means nothing. Still scatological. Well you know, um,
Speaker 1: you know, had you lived around a little late call
Speaker 1: Lake Nios in August of nineteen eighty six, you would
Speaker 1: have seen a three d and twenty eight foot tall
Speaker 1: cloud of death, and had you walked in it, you
Speaker 1: probably would have died. It was frightening. I bet it was.
Speaker 1: Chuck sent me this great picture that you think we
Speaker 1: could post that on our blog? When this comes out,
Speaker 1: and he keeps saying that we actually that would have
Speaker 1: been today with the face transplant, and I did not
Speaker 1: get the rights to that. So did you try to
Speaker 1: get the rights? I did. I looked into it. You're
Speaker 1: such a liar, okay, Well, Chuck sent me this great
Speaker 1: picture of all these dead cows just kind of fallen
Speaker 1: over on their sides around the lake in nine six.
Speaker 1: Basically what happened was on I think the evening of
Speaker 1: August one, all of a sudden there was this big
Speaker 1: rumbling sound and Lake nas Is it's pretty substantial lake.
Speaker 1: I think it's over six hundred feet deep. Yeah this
Speaker 1: is in Africa. We haven't even said that. I'm sorry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's in cam rout Um. And uh, there was this
Speaker 1: rumble from within the lake, and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: this huge column of water shoots out of the middle
Speaker 1: of the lake, hundreds of feet in the air. And
Speaker 1: as its columns going, this this cloud that eventually becomes
Speaker 1: a hundred meter tall cloud starts to develop. But the
Speaker 1: thing is it's kind of hovering close to the lake,
Speaker 1: so it's a really heavy cloud. And then this cloud
Speaker 1: gets the bright idea of moving off of the lake
Speaker 1: and down into the populated valley, which is I guess
Speaker 1: just where the airflow took it, I guess, And it
Speaker 1: clung very low to the ground. It sunk. Basically, it
Speaker 1: just followed the ground into the valley. UM. And so
Speaker 1: you know, you think, hey, there's a cloud. Um, what
Speaker 1: harm can a cloud do? But the people who took
Speaker 1: that attitude paid with their lives, to the tune of
Speaker 1: seventeen hundred of them. Right, people up to fifteen miles
Speaker 1: away from the lake. Uh died livestock, livestock people. Um.
Speaker 1: Some people were knocked unconscious. It depended on the concentration
Speaker 1: the secret ingredient will get too in a second. Um.
Speaker 1: And some people were were unconscious for like thirty six
Speaker 1: hours and they wake up and all their livestock and
Speaker 1: their families dead. Unbelievable. I mean, no, imagine this, like
Speaker 1: really put yourself into that situation. You're hanging around, you're
Speaker 1: living your life of an idyllic, a grarian life, around
Speaker 1: this beautiful lake which is supposedly used to be this
Speaker 1: gorgeous blue was really really pretty, and um, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, the lake blows up and there's a cloud
Speaker 1: of death that kills your entire family and knocks you
Speaker 1: out for a day and a half. Well, in the
Speaker 1: lake turned did you see the after photos that turned
Speaker 1: really brown? I didn't. In the water level lowered and
Speaker 1: uh it was. It was disgusting. It looked like before
Speaker 1: after photo of like a hundred years of like pollution
Speaker 1: as well. And this was overnight. Yeah yeah. So, um,
Speaker 1: finally after about two days, as cloud dissipates, but not
Speaker 1: before it moves through village after villages, killing people. Um.
Speaker 1: And so obviously when people started to come in to
Speaker 1: investigate what happened, they find all these dead bodies. Um,
Speaker 1: the government got involved and rightfully so, yeah, it sounds
Speaker 1: like an X Files episode. Definitely, It's exactly what it
Speaker 1: sounds like. But it was real. Yeah well X Files
Speaker 1: is real too, really sure, based on real accounts. As
Speaker 1: far as I know, every single one did not. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um so yeah, So the government gets involved, which means
Speaker 1: science gets involved, because you know, being an elected official
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily make you a science e type. You know,
Speaker 1: you're not an egghead, right, far from it, right, So
Speaker 1: the Cameroonian government recruited some scientists to say what the
Speaker 1: hell just happened? There's people that were killed by cloud
Speaker 1: of death. What has happened, Chuck? What happened in August
Speaker 1: of six at Lake NIO's cameroon. Well, Josh, the secret
Speaker 1: ingredient and now you know, the answer was CEO two
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide. Yes, pretty simple. But where did it come from?
Speaker 1: That's the thing is they they quickly realized that it
Speaker 1: was CEO two. That wasn't the hard part. Figuring out
Speaker 1: actually how this cloud came up from the lake was
Speaker 1: a hard part. And there were a couple of theories
Speaker 1: at the time. One is that um and underwater volcano
Speaker 1: had erupted and pushed this gas up, which sounded pretty
Speaker 1: plausible to me and actually looked at some of the
Speaker 1: old articles and that's kind of what they said it
Speaker 1: was for a while, right, Well, there's a split camp, right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The problem is that they went through and set up
Speaker 1: the British Geological Survey set up some seismographs around the
Speaker 1: lake and there should have been some small aftershock earthquakes
Speaker 1: and they measured nothing. Not. They also didn't find any
Speaker 1: sudden sulfur levels um that that would have been residual
Speaker 1: from a volcano explosion, right right, So that one kind
Speaker 1: of got scrapped and they went with the other camp,
Speaker 1: which was which was a gigantic, deadly burp basically is
Speaker 1: how it's described in the article, which is exactly what
Speaker 1: it was. So I guess we need to go back
Speaker 1: in time too, when lat Night was formed to really
Speaker 1: understand this, right, we need our backend time music. Okay,
Speaker 1: so n six, Chuck, Um, what Ghostbusters is sweeping the nation? Right? Well, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: we need to go back when late now it was formed.
Speaker 1: It wasn't in Oh, we have to go even further back.
Speaker 1: Here's here's our time travel music again. So, Chuck, what
Speaker 1: year are we in? I mean, this place doesn't look
Speaker 1: very heavily populated. Well, it's a long, long time ago.
Speaker 1: We're talking about thousands of years before Ghostbusters. Yeah, seven
Speaker 1: or eight thousand years maybe, um, And that that's a
Speaker 1: that's a guestimation. So if someone from Cameron writes in
Speaker 1: and says it was actually nine thousand years, then give
Speaker 1: Chuckers a break on this one. It's a long time ago. So, Josh,
Speaker 1: Cameroon in Africa, there's some there's a lot of weak
Speaker 1: spots in the crust around that area. And you know
Speaker 1: what magma is I do. It's a molten lava that
Speaker 1: hasn't reached the the Earth's surface yet exactly, so it's
Speaker 1: like liquid rock. And it's another way to put it. Um.
Speaker 1: It rises from the Earth's mantle and shoots up quickly
Speaker 1: and vertically, and it cuts a tube towards the surface,
Speaker 1: and when it reaches the surface, the magma can rain
Speaker 1: dine rained down a big pile of rock to form
Speaker 1: a cinder cone volcano. Right, absolutely, you're with me? Or
Speaker 1: did you have okay? Can I say the other part
Speaker 1: because it's yeah, yeah. Or if this magma which is
Speaker 1: shooting up out of the ground comes in contact with
Speaker 1: wet rock, an explosion happened, huge explosion and this is
Speaker 1: what formed Like Nios, it's on a big crater. It
Speaker 1: just went kaboom and all of a sudden there's a crater.
Speaker 1: And then this crater started to fill in over the
Speaker 1: years and now it's a volcanic crater. Like yeah, right,
Speaker 1: take a crater add water lake in a very pretty
Speaker 1: long day. So basically that's what happened. Um, You've got
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the lake. You have an old
Speaker 1: tube where the magma rose up and uh to the
Speaker 1: surface and it remains there. So if you go down
Speaker 1: about six miles you'll hit the magma. Right, it's staying
Speaker 1: down there, yes, but there's still CEO two coming up
Speaker 1: through this column right right, but it stays trapped because
Speaker 1: of the fact that, like Nias was six D and
Speaker 1: you know some on feet deep right, there's a every
Speaker 1: thirty three ft there's in one atmosphere of pressure UM.
Speaker 1: And so this is about twenty atmospheres, which is dense
Speaker 1: and heavy enough to keep a bubble of gas held
Speaker 1: down at the bottom right right. The problem is is um,
Speaker 1: the gas builds up in every kind of lake there is, right,
Speaker 1: every lake, every pond. Um. I didn't know this. This
Speaker 1: is interesting. I didn't either, but I'm gonna pretend like
Speaker 1: it did because watch me go. Um. You know, like
Speaker 1: when leaves another organic matter, dead fishies fall to the bottom. Uh,
Speaker 1: they they produce gas c O two, maybe methane, that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. And this happens in anybody you of water, right.
Speaker 1: But the thing is in most climates and temperate climates, um,
Speaker 1: there's an actual gas exchange that happens annually. When the
Speaker 1: temperature is cool, the surface water cools and goes to
Speaker 1: the bottom. Which displaces the gas, and it happens very
Speaker 1: calmly and casually, and there you go, there's no explosion. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 1: The problem with Lake Nios and other lakes and Cameroon
Speaker 1: is that there isn't a seasonal change. It's warm all
Speaker 1: the time. There's never that turnover, and this bubble of
Speaker 1: gas that's coming up from the magma shaft gets bigger
Speaker 1: and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Right, I
Speaker 1: think magma shaft would be a good pseudonym for you
Speaker 1: that is a good student of magma shaft. Yeah, magma shaft,
Speaker 1: so uh yeah. Basically it acts like a champagne cork
Speaker 1: called this water sitting on top of it. And in
Speaker 1: order actually kind of left out the part of the
Speaker 1: beginning that something needs to happen to trigger the gas
Speaker 1: to be released. It's just not just gonna happen on zone.
Speaker 1: And they think it may have been like a rock slide, right,
Speaker 1: or an earthquake. And usually what happens is the whole
Speaker 1: bubble doesn't get displaced, or the whole layer of gas
Speaker 1: doesn't get displaced. Part of it will, but since it's
Speaker 1: a one big cohesive layer, one part of it being
Speaker 1: ripped off will displodge the rest of it, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden you've got a huge column of water
Speaker 1: coming up, unbelievable gas CEO two going everywhere forming a
Speaker 1: cloud of death. Ba boom bata being se villagers and
Speaker 1: countless livestock dead. And this happened a couple of other times.
Speaker 1: Uh And after there's two other like Cameroon is lousy
Speaker 1: with exploding legs. Well, it's because of where it's situated. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is true. Check. It's situated over a very thin
Speaker 1: part of the Earth's crust, as you said, right right.
Speaker 1: And there's two more lakes Lake Monoun that's what I gathered,
Speaker 1: or mon Noon, and like Kivu. Yeah, both of those
Speaker 1: have had incidents as well, but not nearly as deadly. Well,
Speaker 1: Lake Kivu hasn't happened yet. Oh, it hasn't. Lake Kivus
Speaker 1: between Rwanda and Congo. And that one, if it does happen,
Speaker 1: would be a an amazing, an amazingly catastrophic natural disaster.
Speaker 1: It's twice as deep as Lake Nios, which again remember
Speaker 1: killed people from the cloud it produced. Uh So this
Speaker 1: one's twice as deep. Um, and there's about two million
Speaker 1: people living around it, right, so they would be in
Speaker 1: really big trouble if Lake Kivu all of a sudden erupted,
Speaker 1: and it most likely will. It's it's Uh, they've been
Speaker 1: studying it and apparently it's right there about to happen.
Speaker 1: No one's doing a thing about it. Yeah. No, they
Speaker 1: just finally got around to doing something about like Nios,
Speaker 1: they want to talk about that. Yeah, it's a great segue. Actually, Josh, thanks,
Speaker 1: you're natural. Thanks, you've been doing this a year. We
Speaker 1: had a one year universary, by the way, does any
Speaker 1: no one even recognize that? No, I didn't even know when. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we had a fan come in and we had our Yeah,
Speaker 1: no fan, a fan wrote in and um said that
Speaker 1: it was our one anniversary and we all said or
Speaker 1: one episode, which I remember, the hundredth episode. Yeah, one
Speaker 1: year university. Well, happy anniversary, beautiful you two, you two Jerry, Yeah,
Speaker 1: happy anniversary, Jerry. So enough of that. Um, Yes, what
Speaker 1: they basically came up with a really basic Some some
Speaker 1: of the coolest ideas in science to me are so simple,
Speaker 1: Like you would have thought a kid came up with
Speaker 1: this idea basically, like the space shuttle. Yeah, exactly, this
Speaker 1: thing make a big plane that goes into space. Uh,
Speaker 1: they decided to de gass it with a big straw. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They just basically put a pipe the bubble and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden a bunch of CEO two water came
Speaker 1: up and they they de gassi it a couple of
Speaker 1: times a year, I'm sorry, a couple of times a day,
Speaker 1: I think. Yeah, and there's a webcam. Have you seen
Speaker 1: the webcam? No, I saw a picture of it. Looks
Speaker 1: like one of those lakes at like a country club subdivision,
Speaker 1: the Cheesy Fountain. Exactly, that's exactly what it looks like.
Speaker 1: I didn't know there's a webcam. Do you know the address?
Speaker 1: I don't off the top of my head. But what
Speaker 1: do you type in like nine use webcam de gassing webcam?
Speaker 1: You can probably find it. But before you go there,
Speaker 1: you should know that the last image is from November
Speaker 1: of last year, so it looks like it may be uh,
Speaker 1: not actively running anymore, because I think the whole idea
Speaker 1: of a webcams to show things live as it happens,
Speaker 1: I think so too. Yeah, not from November last year.
Speaker 1: So that's basically what they did. They put the first
Speaker 1: pipe in in two thousand one a French engineering team.
Speaker 1: But the sad thing is that these these foreign scientists
Speaker 1: who came to uh Nios to figure out what happened
Speaker 1: said pretty quickly like, this is what we should do.
Speaker 1: We should drop a straw in that. In two thousand
Speaker 1: one the first pipe pointed. But I read that they
Speaker 1: were hoping to have the CEO two levels down by
Speaker 1: next year. That's what I read. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: and I think it looks a little bit better than
Speaker 1: it used to as well. It's pretty good. I don't
Speaker 1: think it's back to where it was six when it
Speaker 1: was really really cool looking, like, but I don't think
Speaker 1: it's the brown mess that it was right afterward either,
Speaker 1: with floating in it and stuff. So you want to
Speaker 1: hear something interesting always, Well, first of all, these kind
Speaker 1: of exploding lakes are actually called limnic eruptions. That's the
Speaker 1: scientific word for it. And we understand the explanation. But
Speaker 1: the people in Cameroon who had lived around Lake nyos
Speaker 1: Um had another story for it, and basically they they are.
Speaker 1: The gist of it is that every once in a while,
Speaker 1: evil spirits rose from the lake and killed people in villages.
Speaker 1: I'm not entirely certain why. Probably because they were evil spirits, right,
Speaker 1: But you know what that's called what it's called a euhemerism,
Speaker 1: really when something's explained in a different uh, when a
Speaker 1: myth is clearly based on historical occurrences. So they're saying
Speaker 1: that these exploding lakes had happened before in the past,
Speaker 1: while people were still living around pre science though, so
Speaker 1: they explained it with evil spirits, emergency from the lake,
Speaker 1: but pretty much the same result, cloud of death at
Speaker 1: c O two, cloud of death made of evil spirits.
Speaker 1: There's in the end, you're still dead and so is
Speaker 1: your livestock. Right, can you imagine being uh, you know,
Speaker 1: as man evolved and started to figure things out, when
Speaker 1: they started thinking and saw a volcano, like what that
Speaker 1: must have I mean they probably thought the same thing
Speaker 1: that some some someone was trying to kill them. They
Speaker 1: did on evil spirits, didn't they. And now when science
Speaker 1: is around there like how does my face read? I know,
Speaker 1: but there's no secrets anymore. It's kind of disappointed still plenty,
Speaker 1: Like do you know how the space shuttle works? No?
Speaker 1: Well I could go read about it, and I guess
Speaker 1: you could figure it out, So Chuck, um, Yeah, we've
Speaker 1: got Lake Nyos. It seems like under control, Lake Kivu
Speaker 1: is still a problem. So they haven't stuck the straw
Speaker 1: on that one yet, not as far as I know.
Speaker 1: And then there's one in Ecuador, Lake Quilatoa, and that
Speaker 1: one's about if it erupted, it would be on the
Speaker 1: level of the degree of iOS. Right, So there's exploding
Speaker 1: likes just waiting for a limnic eruption all around the world.
Speaker 1: So if you live in the tropics near a lake,
Speaker 1: move set your advice. That's my advice. Yeah, So what
Speaker 1: do you think? Is it done? Did we do it?
Speaker 1: I think we covered everything. You're feeling pretty good? Are
Speaker 1: we plugging things any longer? Let's see the blog plug?
Speaker 1: The blog plug it I like the plug from the
Speaker 1: one the face transplant, the hulk one. Blog good? Yeah, Chuck, Josh, right,
Speaker 1: blog fire bad, fire bad? Should we just read that one?
Speaker 1: Should we just reuse the one from that we recorded before? No? Okay,
Speaker 1: Jerry saying no, so start fresh, Chuck. Okay, here we go. So, Josh,
Speaker 1: we have a blog. We've been plugging this like, uh,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of a plug analogy, but I
Speaker 1: can't think of any. We've been plugging this for a while.
Speaker 1: It's on the right side of the home page, just
Speaker 1: where you can get it, so text speak and tech speak,
Speaker 1: and we've gotten a lot of fans interacting now, which
Speaker 1: is cool. And I'd also like to point out that
Speaker 1: the blog is now where you can go just for
Speaker 1: a little news. Josh and I are kind of venturing
Speaker 1: out into these little UH opportunities now, being interviewed on
Speaker 1: ABC News by the way, being tickled by strangers for money.
Speaker 1: Little things like that are starting to pop up here
Speaker 1: and there. So the blog is, well, we'll promote that
Speaker 1: and let people know where they can support us and
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Yeah, I gotta tell you to chuck.
Speaker 1: I'm very grateful for some of my friends, like my
Speaker 1: friend s G. Actually UH is much smarter than me
Speaker 1: and knows all sorts of stuff that I get fed
Speaker 1: that makes me look smart because I just go ahead
Speaker 1: and post on it. I was just one of the
Speaker 1: blog commenters. Yes, yeah, nice. Yeah, so I'm smart lost
Speaker 1: without my smart people, Yeah, be lost without them. That
Speaker 1: was heartfelt. Thanks. I rarely see that out of you.
Speaker 1: I know, I'm usually just so just dark and angry
Speaker 1: and evil like a siftboard kind of, except without the
Speaker 1: red face paint. Right, So I guess that's plugging. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the plug fest. You guys have been plugged. And
Speaker 1: now it's time for in their mail. Oh not yet, Josh.
Speaker 1: And now right now it's time for listener mail. Josh,
Speaker 1: you just have one under the banner of exceptional exceptional.
Speaker 1: Sorry listener mail. That is a long one, Chuck. You're
Speaker 1: gonna read the whole thing, and I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: do my scan thing. This comes to us from Helen
Speaker 1: in Guatemala, specifically in kits Altenango, Guatemala, and she is
Speaker 1: writing in about the twelve episode. She lives in the
Speaker 1: Western Highlands and there's still mine people there, lots of them,
Speaker 1: and uh, she has been fascinated here so much about
Speaker 1: this twenty twelve stuff, but only from US media outlets apparently. No,
Speaker 1: none of the mines are talking about No one cares about.
Speaker 1: I got the impression too when when I was researching,
Speaker 1: and I think we even mentioned that that. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: very much western, Yeah, very much. She said. Our own
Speaker 1: calendar begins every week, month, the year, et cetera. The
Speaker 1: Mind calendars all function in a circular rather than linear
Speaker 1: concept of time and form cycles that repeat infinitely, so
Speaker 1: they don't believe the world's gonna end to any particular
Speaker 1: point on the calendar. The repeating cycles are based on
Speaker 1: the idea of keeping counting of the passage of time,
Speaker 1: which is very important in the culture. So she did
Speaker 1: want to compliment us that we've come closest to just
Speaker 1: completely debunking this than most US media outlets. Don't tell
Speaker 1: it to the Belgians though, right. She did want to
Speaker 1: point out, however, that I believe at one point one
Speaker 1: of us said something about the Mind calendars are used
Speaker 1: in secret. She said, that's not really true. You can
Speaker 1: get them in bookstores all over the place there and
Speaker 1: they are used, and different calendars have different uses, which
Speaker 1: I thought was interesting. There's three major ones, and everyday
Speaker 1: calendar for planning everyday stuff fitting link, a religious calendar
Speaker 1: for planning rites and ceremonies, and an agricultural calendar for
Speaker 1: planning planting and harvesting. And they still use these and
Speaker 1: can get books on how to use them, and it
Speaker 1: sounds like a really kind of an interesting thing. So
Speaker 1: I can see that daily calendar, you know them selling
Speaker 1: it like things to do today if you're mining, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: stock up on canned goods in case world and so
Speaker 1: Helen thank us. And she's in Guatemalan. Cool, cool lady,
Speaker 1: Thanks Helen. We appreciate it. If you live in Guatemala,
Speaker 1: Guam or anywhere else and you want to send chucker me,
Speaker 1: yeah an email, Uh, send it to stuff podcast at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com for more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready, are you