...And Then 1700 People Died.

[Music] i've never actually done this before see what happens two three i'll go for three [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] foreign well that made a mess how about i talk about exactly what happened here inside where it's not quite so hot and sticky carbonation happens when carbon dioxide dissolves in water to make carbonic acid and it does this through pressure reason number 1001 why pressure changes everything now there's a couple of different ways of doing this you know for thousands of years beer makers would add sugar and yeast into a sealed container the yeast would eat the sugar make carbon dioxide with no place to go the pressure builds up and eventually dissolves into the water this can go badly [Music] but today soda companies add fizz to drinks by just injecting carbon dioxide into water and pressurizing it to get a little nerdier the chemical reaction looks like this h2o plus co2 produces h2co3 in a dynamic equilibrium the dynamic equilibrium part means that the reaction can go left to right or go right to left add pressure and the reaction goes to the right release that pressure and the process reverses so when you open a soda can that sound is the sound of water and co2 breaking up still a better love story than twilight that's the sound of water crying but why does mentos make it all so explosive well the theory is that the surface of the mentos is rough and that rough surface then kind of creates millions of little spots where the water and co2 can break apart and because they're heavy they sink down to the bottom allowing more of the surface to be in contact with the water and it just kind of accelerates everything now this is just a fun little science experiment that just kind of helps teach how you know soda works but mostly it's just fun to blow stuff up but it turns out this can also happen in nature on a massive scale and this is not quite so fun [Music] late in the evening of august 15 1984 an explosion rocked the residents of the village of men down in cameroon they told police the next morning that the sound had come from the direction of lake menoun five kilometers to the south a policeman went to the lake to investigate and brought a doctor along with him just in case anybody was hurt and before they even reached the lake they came across a strange cloud they say it looked like pale smoke and just kind of hovered near the ground only reaching about three meters in height but before they got a chance to really even investigate it they both started kind of feeling sick so they had to get out of there once that cloud dispersed they came back to the area and discovered that whatever that cloud was it killed everything strewn all over the place where the bodies of animals and birds and 37 people all of them asphyxiated and many had strange blisters all over their skin the investigators were baffled there was a flattened vegetation around the lake that suggested a five meter high wave had crashed at the shore and there were sulfurous odors in the area as time went on and no answers were found rumors started to spread that the deaths had been deliberate maybe some kind of biological weapon this of course got the attention of the u.s government because weapons that's our thing so they asked professor harold or sigurdsson to investigate he is not only the most icelandic sounding human being alive he's also an expert volcanologist and geochemist which being from iceland only makes sense in fact i think he popped up in my super volcanoes video and he's the right person for the job because lake manoun was actually created by volcanic eruption way way back in the day and it's actually one of 38 lakes that lie on a chain of volcanoes called the cameroon line so as part of his investigation he went around he interviewed locals and he went out on the lake on a boat to get some samples yeah it turned out finding the right spot was actually pretty easy because there were still bubbles coming up to the surface and what he figured out was that these bubbles were carbon dioxide the lake had become saturated with it and these bubbles were just like literally the lake fizzing like a carbonated soda only something caused this to erupt something was the the mentos that caused this lake to explode and in the process it released so much carbon dioxide gas that literally everything and everyone in the area choked to death and after two years of studying this eruption haralder published his theory and gave the phenomenon a name limited eruptions so the obvious question here is how exactly does a lake get saturated with co2 how do you carbonate a lake well it's the same with the beer and the soda examples earlier you add pressure and it turns out an easy way to add more pressure is to just add more water if a lake is deep enough then the water at the bottom will be under so much pressure from the weight of the water above that the water will bond with carbon dioxide just like in soda now most lakes absorb co2 from the air but since the source of the co2 is at the top where the pressure is low it doesn't become carbonated so for that water down at the bottom becomes saturated there has to be some source of carbon dioxide way down at the bottom of the lake and there are two sources that fit that bill volcanic gas vents and decomposing plant are animal matter both of which also create methane which can also dissolve under pressure and what happens to lake water when it combines with co2 or methane at that kind of depth well nothing actually so long as the pressure stays high but if the pressure drops [Music] imagine 50 billion mentos falling into a hundred billion liters of diet coke this is a phenomenon that heralded cigarettes and called lake overturn and lake banana is not the only lake that's experienced this or the deadliest actually not even close literally two months after heralder sigurdsson published his findings a second event occurred only 100 kilometers away this one at lake naios around 9 pm on august 21 1986 people living near the lake heard a rumble and a wind caused some people to pass out the next day investigators found the lake transformed the blue waters had actually turned red from iron being dredged up from the depths they found that a massive wave had struck portions of the lake shore with waves cresting as high as 100 meters in some places in fact it damaged the contours of the lake so much that it dried out a waterfall but far more disturbing was the death around the lake it wiped out literally everything eyewitnesses would later describe a chilling silence in the area there were no bird calls no animals moving around not even any bugs i think the creepiest detail that i came across in the eyewitness reports was the absence of flies like dead bodies were all over the place but none of them had any flies on them because even the flies were dead the human death toll in the end of this thing came to 1746 people this was a massive disaster and it brought a whole lot more experts to cameroon they found blisters in the bodies just like they did at lake manoonoon and this led some people to believe that maybe a volcano had erupted but volcanoes let's just say they aren't quite so subtle yeah volcanic eruptions throw out huge amounts of rock and ash and they create lava flows and they release sulfur into the air now you might remember that they reported the smell of sulfur at lake manoun well it was also smelled by nios survivors but when investigators went to go you know find evidence of it they couldn't find any elevated sulfur levels anywhere the water was also too cool for it to have been a volcanic eruption investigators said that if it was a volcanic eruption it would have been at least 40 degrees celsius warmer it was pretty clear that the co2 level was the culprit for the deaths in fact one of the key investigators was a guy named george cling he actually took a sample of the lake nios water and said it literally exploded from its container but there were still some major questions about this number one would be the smell co2 doesn't smell like sulfur now on the other hand it has been known to trigger sensory hallucinations so maybe the sulfurous odor was just an illusion or maybe the survivors did smell sulfur but it was at such low doses it didn't leave any trace amounts behind and then there was the blisters on all the people's skin one theory was that it wasn't carbon dioxide but carbon monoxide that did that that's been known to cause blisters by limiting the circulation of blood in people's skin or they could have been caused by trace amounts of some other toxic gases that are mixed in with the co2 which kind of leaves just the one big question which is why did these lakes erupt what caused this pressure drop that set everything in motion lake minnoon and lake naio seem to have been accumulating gases for quite some time both are thought to be fed by soda springs that carry gases from deep underground one theory was that a landslide might have broken the lake seal or a volcanic eruption that was just kind of too small to leave direct signs now both disasters occurred during monsoon season so george cling has a theory that that maybe just the the colder rain water uh after a rain storm may have cooled the water just enough to allow the deep water to rise which would lower the pressure kaboom i think it's also interesting that both of these took place around the equator where the temperature doesn't really fluctuate that much throughout the year so it might have been able to you know contain all this co2 for so long because there weren't any temperature changes that would have caused that pressure to drop the fact is we may never know what exactly caused these two eruptions but we do know the most important thing how to prevent them in the future in 1990 a team of engineers added plumbing to the exploding lakes there were money problems at first it took a little while to get going but they basically installed artificial fountains to let the gassy water erupt from the depths and nios was so saturated that the fountain shot up 45 meters high at first it's gone down since then which is good that means it's working and yeah thanks to these efforts lake manoon and lake nios are now considered safe but in the words of the great master yoda there is another about 2 000 kilometers west of lake minnoon lies lake kivu kivu is not only much larger and considerably deeper than these two lakes but it's also sitting on top of volcanic vents that have been releasing gas into it for thousands of years yeah they estimated in 2021 that the amount of co2 in lake kivu equals as much as 5 of global co2 emissions that's in one lake so yeah if lake kivu exploded it would be bad for like everyone but for the people nearby it would be an absolute disaster actually no lake nios was a disaster and that was with a population of 14 000 people living around it lake kivu sits on the border of rwanda and the democratic republic of congo and there are nearly 2 million people living around it and as if that wasn't enough it's also bordered by an active volcano mount near yagongo which actually erupted in may 2021 like half a million people had to evacuate luckily kivu didn't explode actually the size of kivu might be at saving grace it's just so big and heavy it can kind of keep that pressurized gas trapped down there but don't relax too much because it also contains a huge amount of methane down there which is more prone to overturn now the upside to methane is it's a natural gas so people are incentivized to get it out of the lake because then you can sell that and that's exactly what's happening in 2015 a new power plant came online called kibuwat that's currently delivering 26 megawatts of electricity to the rwandan power grid i mean talk about a win-win of course every rose has its thorn some experts are concerned that the methane extraction might actually destroy the layer of dense water that keeps the gases trapped and if that doesn't trigger an explosion directly it might make the lake more sensitive to other triggers like mountainy or egongo on top of that many locals actually make their living off of the lake in the fishing industry and their concerns that the methane extraction could stir up toxic chemicals that could make that a problem now to be fair the rwandan government is monitoring the water situation and so far so good the kiva lot isn't a perfect solution at their current rate they'll extract less than 5 percent of the lake's methane in 25 years plans to expand have been in place but they've moved really slowly of course they kind of have to like kivu is literally a time bomb only difference is with a time bomb at least you know how much time you have so next time you crack open a soda just remember you're flirting with some dangerous chemistry don't get me started on the sugar it's bad for you so bad for 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 964,303

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: soEBanqlPiI

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2022